The Gaea Device
by Nightheart
Summary: In this world no-one is exactly what they seem, not silly gunmen nor uptight insurance girls. The world has been biding its time, waiting, for the pieces to fall into place, and now... destiny moves.
1. Chapter 1

_Journal of Meryl Stryfe Fifteenth Day after the Vernal Equinox New Oregon Territory_

_I woke up from another nightmare last night. It was the same one I've been having every night since Vash was forced to kill Legato. I remember that my heart was pounding and my breath was short and my body felt covered in cold sweat. The sweet metallic taste of adrenaline stung the back of my tongue. The dream disturbs me for a lot of reasons, some of which are obvious, but others..._

_I was there on the cliff, alone but for him, staring into his cold amber eyes that hypnotized me, staring like snakes at me, through me, into me. He took my mind in a very precise mental grip, cold and firm as the iron bars of a cage. In the dream it was a cage, I could feel it but not see it; but I knew it was there, all around me. I struggled and shook and beat myself against that cage but it didn't move; the door didn't even rattle. Slowly it started shrinking in on me, constricting around me like the coils of a snake and still those eyes stared at me. Legato shrunk and changed form, transforming into a raven and staring at me with those beady little eyes. He cawed once and burst into a thousand flapping ravens disappearing in a whirlwind of black._

_And that's when I woke up... but not before I heard him whisper into my mind with a voice like the wind over a grave with just a touch of gravelly caw, like a raven's voice speaking to me._

_"I know what you are... Meryl Stryfe."_

_I looked over to my friend and junior partner Millie to make certain that I hadn't disturbed her with my sudden surge into wakefulness. I don't want her knowing that I'm having trouble sleeping; she'd only ask what was wrong and I feel that this was my burden to bear._

_I alone should shoulder the guilt for that day, the pain of forcing him to make that terrible decision... take a life or watch us die._

_The rational part of me wants to argue that he would have been forced to make that decision anyway. Anyone could argue quite logically that Legato was insane, and he wanted to force Vash to make that choice, to take a life. If it hadn't been me and Milly, it would still have been an entire town full of innocents that would have been the leverage he used. Vash wouldn't have turned away from them. Apparently Vash's brother and by extension that human servant of his were had already made the decision for him._

_I tell myself this, but most of me just listen to such sensible words however. The plain fact of the matter was that I was there... against Vash's wishes. He asked me to stay away and I went anyway so it was my fault that I had been trapped there, helpless, like a toma to the slaughtering pen. If I hadn't been there, who knows what could have happened. The outcome might have been different. Maybe he would have found another way. It a very very slim chance that it would have turned out differently, but my mind torments me with the fact that we can never know for certain. I know for certain though, that my and Milly presence did affect the outcome, however slightly... he took delight in telling me so while I was helpless under his power._

_::So pleased you could join us,:: he said. It was awful, he was taunting me inside my mind and enjoying it._

_::Vash would like having all of his friends here,:: he told me. Even now I feel like something vaguely unclean had touched me in way that doesn't wash out. I get the chill just thinking about it, so i try not to. It doesn't go away though._

_He had known that the two of us would be, if not the deciding factor, then certainly the icing on the cake._

_What's worse than the fact that I was in danger is the fact that I put Milly in danger. She's my junior partner and my responsibility as well as my friend. She has to trust that I'll make the right choices, the choices that will keep her alive and well, and I failed in that. I let my emotions dictate my decisions and she was put in danger because I wanted to follow him. My fault, I gave the order. Milly followed me. I should have listened to him._

_I really should put the blame right where it belongs and lay the whole mess soley at the doors of the ones responsible for it; Knives and his psychopathic henchman Legato Bluesummers, but it doesn't matter to me that they planned it. My heart won't see that it was really they who masterminded and manipulated the situation until there was only one possible outcome for thier victim, Vash; it matters that I was there and had been a part of it. Maybe if I hadn't been there, things would have been different. I'll never know._

_And for that I'll carry the guilt of it to my grave._

_Meryl Stryfe_

& & &

Meryl scanned her eyes back over the words she'd written into the blank page of her leather-bound travel journal and debated taking the expedient of simply ripping it out and burning it. The stark emotional honesty teetered dangerously close to the edge of melodrama and smacked ever so slightly of angst. She frowned. She didn't like either state since they were both too near the region of whining for her taste. Meryl prided herself on being the sensible one, calm and capable, so she almost never indulged in talking about what was truly in her heart with another, even with Milly, for fear of being seen as weak or vulnerable (or even worse, pitiable). It would probably have been somehow less threatening if she just ripped it out and threw it away, but she decided against it in the end. Her journal was the one place she had to be completely honest, with no filters and no need to guard herself against other perceptions. If she couldn't be entirely honest with even her closest friend, and she already knew she wasn't honest in the reports she sent back to the head office, then there was no place but her thoughts for her (and those weren't always very helpful... too many little voices composed of all the people who'd shaped and moulded her growing up for her to find any useful peace and meaning there).

She could get rid of this written record of what was going on inside of her head; after all, anyone could stumble across this journal and read it. She could replace it with an entry that was nothing more than a humdrum account of her daily boring existence since the departure of Vash the Stampede... but she wouldn't. Despite the danger of someone being able to come along and read and know what was going on in her mind she knew she'd let the entry stand because by its very permanence it seemed to make the shadows that loomed larger in her mind feel less intimidating. It made her feel like someday she'd be able to flick on the light and see that that sinister shape in the dark was mothing more than an old coat rack.

Besides, her father had been in the habit of writing in his journal every day and sometimes just the act of writing in her own made her feel a little closer to him. It also helped her get all of her ducks in a row inside her mind before she had to start writing her report to the agency which was now, she was ashamed to admit, more half-truth than real truth.

:Part of me wishes he'd found me a little less trustworthy,: she thought wryly to herself. :I wouldn't now have so much to hide.:

Since he'd come clean with her, it had felt a little strange and a little nerve-wracking having to write those weekly reports to HQ about her assignment and not really be able to say anything about besides basically "all quiet on the western front... so far." Between Vash being outside of her purveiw off on a mission to save the world somewhere out in the middle of no-where, and the job at the saloon that she wasn't supposed to have because side-jobs while in the field were strictly forbidden by Bernardelli's unless they were directly related to thier assignment, Meryl's reports had gotten a little more creative than she was happy with. They weren't outright lies, but half-truths could often be more difficult to manage... one always had to be careful to remember just how much of the truth one has already told.

_I know one thing I'm not putting in there,_ she thought dryly. _If they didn't fire me outright for claiming my assignment isn't human they'd probably very gently suggest that I take a little time off with the company shrink to have a nice little mental break._

Still, it wasn't all bad. While it was true that Meryl detested the sort of menial work that came with her job at the bar (she hadn't gone through three years of college to wait tables and put up with sleazy assholes in some backwoods out in the middle of nowhere dammit!) it did have one thing going for it. There were times when it could be great stress relief.

_Post Scriptum: _she added

_Another bar-fight broke out tonight. I won._

**End Prologue.**

& & &

**Authors Note: No, I haven't actually dropped off the face of the earth, I'm still writing. I'm just a very lazy poster. I've been working on the main body to this one since before I ever started posting chapters of Home. It's my epic baby. It's also apparently so intimidating in it's granduer that just the size of it alone is enough to scare off potential beta-readers. I'm not kidding. I sent the file to a friend of mine to look over and he ran away with his tail tucked between his legs. I guess I'll have to be my own beta, so any errors in spelling that have slipped through my net are purely my own fault. **

**Kick back and relax 'cause we're in this for the long haul.**


	2. A Simple Man

She'd taken one look at him when he strode triumphantly into town with the body of his most troublesome and thankfully still unconscious brother slung over his shoulder like so much baggage and ordered him directly to his bed for some rest.

"You look exhausted, go sleep," she'd said. "Milly and I will take care of the rest."

He'd almost protested but she'd silenced him with one of her trademark 'argument is futile and if you know what's good for you you'll smile and nod' looks and he'd just decided to thank her for her kindness and do as she said. Space was at a premium in their little house but even so it seemed that the ever-together Meryl had managed to anticipate him. Two small beds, little more than cots with extra padding really, were laid out side by side in the room that had once had only his own bed in it. He laid his brother carefully into the cot farthest from the door resisting the dual temptations of just tossing him off his shoulder (Knives was very heavy) and tieing him down so he couldn't sneak off and start the battle over again (Knives wouldn't let just a little rope stop him if he was determined to win free, and the attempt would likely just piss him off further).

_So now what_? Vash wondered as he flopped into his own cot with a feeling of such relief. His body was exhausted but over a century of having to keep his instincts alert and his senses sharp for the first hint of threat wouldn't let his mind quiet down the way he wanted it to.

He'd won the fight but the war might just be far from over, that all depended on what Knives did when he woke up. However Vash was tired of taking things as they came, there had to be something he could do ahead of time. Something he could do to prepare. Meryl and Millie were human; if Knives woke up in a mood there was a more than distinct possibility that he would take control of one or both of them, just as he had taken control of those poor villagers and make them do things against their will, possibly even use them to hurt Vash.

_I hate to think so ill of my brother, but long experience has shown me that Knives likes to take the the devious route. It would be in keeping with him to make them kill themselves or each other in front of me when I'm unable to stop them._

If having perfect strangers killed before his eyes was horrifying for him, having people he truly cared about killed in the same manner was something from out of a nightmare. He'd suffered horribly when Rem had died, to this day he still suffered the loss of her but...

Mind back on track, he reminded himself. He found he was always easily distracted when the subject he needed to think about was one he really didn't want to. What to do with and/or about Knives was a big question. Vash was rather hoping that his brother might have seen the light or at least be willing somehow to meet him halfway.

_He doesn't have to like people... he could just leave them alone_, Vash thought hopefully. Vash would even be willing to give up his wandering ways, even (gulp) settle permanently in a place far away from anyone or anything else, maybe some abandoned ship or the like. He wouldn't be _happy _about it, but if it kept Knives from continuing in his attempt to destroy mankind he'd do it and feel relieved.

_I don't wanna live out in the middle of nowhere with my psycho brother though_! he thought plaintively. He _liked _being around people, especially kids. He'd always imagined having a few of his own one day "once all this was over" (that had been a mantra he'd pinned his hopes on for the better part of a century). On the seeds ship he'd enjoyed being with his twin but he'd still had Rem around and had enjoyed her company too.

_That was before Knives went crazy_, he admitted. They hadn't gotten on well (understatement much?) since he and the rest of humanity had crash-landed on this dustball. Having his brother kill his only other friend and parental-guidance figure had put an understandable strain on their relationship.

_And then there's... **her**_, he thought, at last allowing his mind to alight on the thought it had been circling round like a moth fluttering near its chosen flame.

She had given him such a look on his return, all joy and relief and tenderness, he had been so taken aback by it he'd nearly tripped and dropped his brother. Vash was an old hand at reading people, and Meryl wasn't so difficult to read once you knew what to look for. Oh, she was still a tough nut; she played her cards close to her chest and didn't go giving herself away at the drop of a coin. That was why the soft look had taken him so completely by surprise, for her to be so open (well, open for _Meryl _anyway) had to mean she'd realized how she felt and had come to some kind of decision for herself.

_Now what to do about that_, he wondered.

He'd known for a while that Meryl's attachment to him had to go beyond an insurance girl just doing her job, no matter how he'd tried to tell her not to get involved she was right there in the thick of things helping him as she could. He didn't know how things would have turned out after That Day... the day he'd killed Legato, if she and Milly hadn't been there for him.

_I suppose I have several options open... hopefully anyway_.

First, he could ignore it. That would usually be his chosen method, emotional entanglements were something he avoided (despite his skirt-chasing ways) seeing as he had his own personal Sword of Damocles (or was it the Rock of Demosthenes?) hanging over his head in the form of his twin brother and all those Gung-Ho assholes Knives had set on him. But now the matter was settled, or about to be anyway and he had options open to him that he had kept firmly closed before.

That left reciprocation. It was chancey, _and _problematic. Chancey because he had never let himself feel those sorts of feelings for a woman before simply because he knew for certain it would eventually be used against him, and also because of who he was (a walking disaster) he just knew was bound to screw it up somehow.

Problematic because... well it just _was_. Knives wouldn't be in favor of the idea (probably another massive understatement) but Vash was tired of planning his life around his twin. He wanted a life of his own dammit! He wanted to be happy.

_I don't actually want much out of life_, he thought morosely. _A pretty wife, lots of kids, maybe a dog. Nah I don't like dogs_.

With or without the dog, the universe seemed determined to deny him his simple wish. The bounty on his head was only one factor, his brother yet another (rather huge and all consuming factor) but Vash was beginning to suspect that he just had rotten luck.

_I've given up home, happiness, and even mild contentment to make sure people are happy and safe. I have scars on my body that make me look like Doctor Frankenstein's monster. I've endured crazed lunatics trained as assassins out for my blood, federal marshals with obsessive grudges against me and an entire herd of sandworms trying to eat me... I think I've earned a little peace, I think I **deserve **some happiness_.

It was still a problem however... Even though he'd defeated him; Vash's brother Knives was _still _a factor. Knives didn't need to be able to hold a gun to be effective, he could wipe out an entire town from his bed using only the powers of his mind (or more accurately, force an entire town to wipe itself out).

_What was I thinking_?! Vash berated himself, feeling fear hit him like cold water, sending a shock-wave through him. The memories of exactly what his brother was capable of called themselves up with startling clarity in his minds eye.

_I should never have come back here, never even have brought him back here, I've put the girl's lives in danger._

He wished with a small pang that his friend Wolfwood were there. Sure, he wasn't exactly forgiving and pacifisty (in fact he'd probably have told Vash to put a bullet in his brother's head, or done it himself) but Vash had never had anyone else he'd trusted as much to watch his back. Vash didn't for a second believe that thier friendship was entirely on Knives' orders, Wolfwood had, after all, saved his life from a bullet from Caine the Longshot.

_That doesn't mater now,_ Vash admonished himself, clearing his thoughts._ Regrets won't change anything. I have to figure out for myself how I'm going to save my brother, how I'm going to do it before he has a chance to hurt anyone else. Especially the Girls. If he wakes up..._

He'd sense them. He'd sense them and he'd kill them.

"...do you think of Mister Vash bringing Mister Knives back?" Millies voice sounded softly in the next room. To a normal human's ears they would have been speaking low enough tha the words would be indistinguishable, but Vash wasn't normal so he could hear them fine. He eavesdropped shamelessly.

There was a soft sigh from Meryl and she paused for a long moment before she said

"I'm honestly not certain what to think. I'd love to believe that Vash knows what he's doing and that everything will be just fine from here on in but I'm afraid I'm a pessimist and blind optimism simply isn't in my nature," she replied frankly. "I don't want to pressure him, Vash has enough to worry about; but maybe it would be a wiser idea to take his twin someplace a little safer, at least until we know one way or the other."

"Safer Meryl?" Millie questioned. "Like where?"

"Good point, there really are no real "safe" places here on Gunsmoke are there?" she said in a dry tone. "Well, maybe someplace far away from everyone; lord knows there's more than enough empty, ininhabited space to go around on this dustball. Maybe we're worrying for nothing; Vash probably already knows his next move. He's a much better person than I am."

"Why do you say that Meryl, I think you're a great person!"

"Are you kidding me?" Meryl said, her tone reflected the veiw that she thought her friend was nuts. "How could you have been around me this long and not noticed that my personality is, shall we say, _eccentric_? I'm proud, short-tempered, stubborn, domineering, too blunt for my own good, prickly, judgmental, obsessive, controlling--"

"Hey! Come on now--" Millie tried to protest.

"Millie, I know my faults," she insisted. "I could change them if I wanted to, probably... but the fact is that I don't _want _to change; not even for love."

"Who say's you have to?" Millie asked softly.

Meryl made no reply and a moment later the sound of typewriter keys clacking filed the silence.

Millie's right, who says she has to change? So what if she's proud, stubborn, judgmental, domineering, prickly and controlling? She doesn't flinch at the worst disaster... of course she wouldn't I guess, being a disaster investigator and all, but still. Anyone who can take my life with any level of equanimity at all is definitely worth keeping around.

Even after the unconscious comparisons he'd made between them on That Day, Vash was well aware that Rem and Meryl had little, if anything, in common with one another besides a vague physical resemblance. Meryl was very much her own person with a practical streak that on occasion bordered on heartlessly pragmatic. She was no Saint Rem, even if she had once repeated Rem's philosophy exactly, there was a harsher core to her that he could sense; something made of steel and lightning, that wouldn't blink at having to deal with the harsh realities of things; that would do whatever might be necessary to ensure the safety of those she loved.

It was strange; sometimes when he looked at her he saw the kind wise and caring visage of his mentor and mother-figure, Rem, but most times she was purely and wholly Meryl Stryfe and very much her own person. He'd come to realize that comparing the two women was completely futile. Meryl was earthy, practical, pragmatic, and no kind of philosopher... certainly she was no pacifist. With her fiery temper and fierce protectiveness she bore little if any resemblance to the woman who insisted that there was always a way to have it both ways. Meryl seemed to accept that sometimes, there really was no other choice than the lesser of two evils.

"Sure, do your best to help out and do good where you can," she'd said late one night while they were doing dishes and having some time together. "But don't beat yourself up if things aren't perfect. It's an imperfect universe, you do what you can."

That pretty much seemed to sum up Meryl's take on things anyway. Vash still wasn't sure of he was able to agree with that outlook or not; he'd spent so long defending his own way of thinking that accepting the idea that there might come a situation where he couldn't save everyone just felt like giving up.

She's right about one thing though; there really are no "safe" places where Knives is involved. The faith she expressed in him warmed him a little, even if it was misplaced.

I have no idea what I'm going to do next. No plan, no direction.

Another thing he liked about Meryl; she always seemed to know what she was doing, even if she really didn't. Her practical no-nonsense nature gave her a sort of appearance of confidence that never seemed to waver. That practicality seemed to cut right through all of the strangeness and confusion and get right down to the heart of matters. It was part of what had made him willing to confide in her, and his faith _hadn_'_t _been misplaced; she'd been sympathetic to what he'd been through, but not afraid or taken aback by the strangeness of his life. She'd simply accepted his story as part of him and gotten on with things.

_It's almost like she's some how used to dealing with weirdness_, he thought. For one wild moment he entertained the notion that maybe, like himself, there was a whole lot more to Meryl Stryfe than just a normal insurance girl thrust into an insane situation, but then...

_Nah, that's just silly_, he thought, immediately dismissing the notion. _Meryl's as prosaic as meatloaf, and about as psychically aware as a rock._

He should know too, Vash had always been particularly attuned to psychic vibrations; over the years the teeming sea of humanity had formed a sort of background noise that he'd learned to block out but that didn't mean he was completely incapable of using the other part of his abilities; he'd simply chosen not to.

_And look where that landed me_, he recriminated himself.

If he'd just bitten the bullet and learned to use his powers just the same as his brother had, Vash would have been able to end the fight with Legato without having to kill him. Oh he'd tried alright; Vash had made several stumbling first attempts at using his own clumsy psychic abilities to block out Legato's but to no avail. He simply hadn't had the knowledge or the training to combat a fully trained telepath in his own baliwik. Knives had known that of course, Knives had known that Vash felt that using his powers to control people was wrong on a very basic level; that was why he'd chosen to fight in that manner. The fight had nearly cost him Meryl, who as a normal person had been unable to defend herself against psychic attack and had been completely at Legato's non-existant mercy that day.

But that's odd, he thought, his mind suddenly stumbling across an anomaly about the incident that had eluded his notice before (Vash had not wanted to mentally revisit the tragedy, and there was the fight with his brother to worry about). There had been a moment, very briefly, when Vash had felt something brush, featherlight, on the edge of his mind. He'd assumed that it had been Legato and so had tried to psychically swat it away, but now he wasn't so sure.

_I'm probably just imagining things_, he told himself.

In fact, now that he thought about it, the one time he'd ever tried to "listen in" on her thoughts (a moment of weakness out in the sands, before he'd had to leave her) the tiny delicate little probe he'd sent her way had bounced off her like a stone skimming over water. She was not only normal, but abnormally normal.

Some people had minds that were so neat and organized that they were nearly impossible to read. The average person's mind was always somewhat "cluttered" with little stray thoughts poking out here and there to flit through the air to no consequence; but some people had minds that were so organized that nothing escaped them. Trying to poke your telepathic nose in them was like sticking your finger in the cogs of a clock; you'd just get pinched between the gears. Meryl seemed to have one of those clockwork minds, opaque but to a very concentrated probe; and that would be just rude.

Opaque to "sending" or not, Legato was still able to take control of her, he thought darkly. And whatever his minion was capable of, Knives will be able to do in time as well.

Which brought him back to his original quandary... so now what? Keeping him around the girls was just asking for trouble. He really didn't have anyplace else safe to send his brother to heal. He couldn't just lock him in a box and forget about him (tempting as the thought was). And Vash had no real plan for what to do with him if Knives proved uncooperative when he finally did wake up.

_Those energy blasts were enough to shut him down for at least a month so I have a few weeks grace period_, he thought, closing his eyes and succumbing to exhaustion. _I'm sure I'll think of something._

_

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**As requested, Chapter One of this guys might want to pull out a Snickers and settle in because we're in this for the long haul. I actually got my lazy butt in gear today and divided this baby up into chapters (I write my stories as one, _long _uninterrupted file on notepad and then go back and divide it into chapters based on story flow later on)** **there's a lot of them, and nearly all of them are good sized. I want to send a shout out to Lady Spezz and Inkydoo for the reveiws, this one's up so soon because you specifically requested it. **

**Reviews are love... love me?  
**


	3. One More Day

Meryl tried to dismiss her sense of unease at the sight of her new house-guest when she checked in on the two boys a few hours later to see if they needed anything. They were both sound asleep, Vash sprawled out at all angles over his cot, long spindly limbs hanging over the sides in a careless drape, his brother, straight as a rod, contained and conformed. The fact that they both looked so harmless did not lessen the tiny frisson of fear that fluttered at the base of her spine when she looked at the composed face of humanity's worst danger. That flutter of fear was replaced by an altogether _different _flutter when she looked upon the face of humanities staunchest protector.

_Even in sleep he looks kinda goofy_, she thought with amusement.

The worry replaced itself when she looked over at the other twin, part of her was kind of happy with the tacit trust Vash showed in brining him back here, the other half of her was not so sure about the whole situation.

From all that Vash had told her, Knives was a case study of an extreme sociopath; deep and unreasoning hatred and paranoia, no concept of guilt or remorse, all symptoms of deep mental illness, it was only natural that having to share an abode with such a one would make her uneasy.

And she got to live with him. She'd have slept with a gun under her pillow but she didn't think that if it came down to it, the gun was going to do her any good against him. Meryl suppressed a shudder of fear and tried to pretend it was just the chill of the morning air.

She remembered with horrifying clarity the way that Legato had taken her mind in a very precise grip, how she had somehow been able to feel his mind wrapped like a steel vice choking off her own ability to control her body. She'd been able to breathe, and her heart had functioned just fine, but when she'd tried to exert conscious motion control it had been like running up against a brick wall.

She'd fought him, tried with all of her might to rip her mind away from his implacable grip. Legato had terrified her, frightened her in a way that _still _kept her up at nights, reliving the moment she realized how helpless she was.

_I cut things way too close_, she berated herself. _I should never have ignored my common sense. That was stupid, and I'm not a woman who's known for doing stupid things. I've always been the sensible one._

It had been strange, now that she thought back on the events of that day... she felt deep deep down that there should have been a way for her to fight him off. Perhaps it was the guilt of a survivor for having made it through without having been harmed too badly while someone else paid the price for her own decision. After all, it had been _she _who had made the call, _she _who had chosen to follow him. But somehow, she didn't really believe that.

And that feeling puzzled her. It wasn't logical, and Meryl prided herself on always being a sensible woman. Her boss, Miser James T Bernardelli had always appreciated Meryl's knack for getting down to the bones of the event or matter, deconstructing the event to it's basic parts, categorizing them and sending back a full and detailed report for him to act upon; that above all was the reason she was class A-1 at such a young age. No detail was too obscure and no event was inexplicable; with the right information gathered. Silly, baseless things like "intuition" or "hunches" were things she usually ignored, they had no sense or logic to them, they could not be proven or weighed or measured and thus they had no real place in her world... up until she'd met Vash the Stampede that was.

Then, everything that had once made so much _sense_, had been able to be deconstructed and explained, were now unsolved. The impossible was possible. There were living beings inside the plants that powered whole cities. There were plant angels that could walk about by themselves. There were people who had lived for over a century that looked no older than maybe their mid-twenties, who looked and acted human in nearly every way, well enough to fool _her_. Who walked like a man-cub and talked like a man-cub... but _weren_'_t_. They had powers and abilities that were perhaps beyond even her ability to file, categorize and understand. Powers that enabled them to level entire cities with a blast of energy so great it left behind nothing but disintegrated rocks and the smell of ozone in the air. Powers that had made her even her shiver in fear.

:_But was it fear? Or was it something else?_: Meryl wondered to herself, not for the first time.

In the year they had been parted since the events at the city of Augusta she had kept mentally revisiting that night. Something had _happened_, not just the fact that the city had literally been blown off the map, not even the fact that she had worried of loosing a man she had reluctantly come to see as a friend. Something had happened to _her_, personally. When the wind from that blast had washed over her smelling of power and lightning something deep inside of herself had recognized it on some level that Meryl hadn't been consciously aware of. Had recognized and _responded_.

Something deep inside her body had stirred, like a slumbering beast rumbling in it's sleep. A slumbering part of her she hadn't known was there until she felt it move and wake a little. It had felt like the time she'd stood next to an enormous towering amplifier at a rock concert and let the drums make her chest thump and her skin pulse, her body shake and her marrow jump. The power washing over her had made her very bones thrum in a strange resonance, like she was nothing more than a harp-string being vibrated by a tuning fork. It had felt to her like the power not only had washed through her like the shock of an ordinary explosion, but something in it had wrapped itself around her, bathing in in a soft glowing luminescence, warming and soothing her. Something inside her had drank in the feeling greedily, had recognized what it was.

The recognition had triggered a memory, there in an instant and gone in a flash; a memory of Meryl sitting with her father someplace deep underground. It had been a cave but it hadn't _looked _like a cave, everywhere on the floors and walls and ceilings there had been some strange complex patterns of spirals and knot-works in a strange, pulsing blue-white light. In the center of the cave had stood a massive spire of pure white crystal, pulsing slightly and... singing. It had sang the most beautiful song but it wasn't a song that existed in sound, it had been a song written in power, pure energy and she hadn't heard it with her ears but with her entire being. Meryl had come back to herself a moment later, and shook her head certain that the flash of memory had been nothing more than a vivid dream because if such a strange event had happened surely she would have remembered it! But her heart and intuition told her that it had been as real an event as her seventh birthday; and that scared her. She didn't know how she could possibly have a memory of an event that had never happened; it just made no _sense_! Meryl had gone back to December feeling nervous and uneasy in her mind and body. It had felt so intensely personal that she hadn't talked about it with anyone, even Milly (who had sensed something amiss anyway, but apparently had put it down to Meryl pining over Vash or something like that).

Meryl didn't know then how she knew, but something inside her had _recognized _that power. There was no possible way she should have been able to recognize it, but when she asked Milly about it a month later, whether she'd felt anything odd about the explosion at Augusta, she'd answered in the negative. Apparently Meryl had been the only one to have the odd feeling of peace through her fear and the flash of memory that couldn't possibly have existed.

And in the time since that day things had only gotten stranger for her. Meryl was accustomed to dealing with the world through the medium of facts and figures, solid concrete things she could lay her hands (either mental or physical) on and deal with straight-forwardly. Since she'd rejoined Vash it had felt like the world she knew no longer _existed_; or it did, but it was all nothing more than a tin venner over a world that was completely different from the one she thought was reality. The feeling was akin to having looked everyday at an ordinary clay flowerpot and then to pass by it again, pause to look at it, only this time taking one short step to the right, and discover that what she'd always taken to be an ordinary clay flowerpot was in fact a priceless antique urn from old earth. It looked the same on the surface, mostly, but the content had changed entirely. Or perhaps it was only her _perception _of it.

The thought that maybe nothing was exactly as it seemed _troubled _her, and made her **deeply **uneasy, especially when a small still voice from deep within herself whispered "**not even me**". Was _she _different from everyone somehow? Meryl shook her head; _that _couldn't be, she was the most ordinary person she knew. If anyone was going to be special or unique around here (besides Vash) it would be Milly. That girl was just uncanny sometimes. No if there was one thing Meryl had always been certain of it was that she was utterly and in all ways perfectly mundane.

_But if that's true, then why do I have this unsettling **feeling **sometimes_, she wondered to herself.

At first, she'd just written the odd pangs of intuition off as stress, or perhaps a mid-life crisis trying to hit early. But more and more Meryl was beginning to get the feeling that there was something _different _about herself. It felt like there was another person inside of her, a part of her that knew something that the rest of her didn't know and it was slowly starting to wake up from a long nap. Meryl was perfectly happy right then and didn't really need or want any other weirdness in her life, dealing with the out-wash from Vash was already almost more than she could handle and that wasn't even happening to _her, _directly.

_Speaking of Vash_, she thought, with another glance over at the room he and his brother had disappeared into. Now what?

He'd brought his brother back with him. True, Meryl had hoped that Vash wouldn't be forced to slay him if only because it would hurt Vash even more than Knives had already managed to hurt him. And she'd also hoped that he would come back to her and Milly, because he was thier friend and her wanted to, perhaps even because he was... more than a friend? Maybe now he could take some time for himself, stop carrying the world on his shoulders. In all of this, her mind had somehow never figured on what it would mean if he returned and hadn't killed his brother. Of course he couldn't just leave him out there in the desert! If only because it would make his brother a million times more pissed off with him than he was before, and if his anger before that had been such that he was willing to sic a team of crack assassins on his brother to make him suffer, his anger _afterward _didn't even bear thinking about!

There was no real doubt in her mind that Knives was a threat. Even though the information she had on him was mostly secondhand; after all, she only really had Vash's word that the events he'd told her were true and Disaster Investigators never relied solely on witness accounts (after all, the mind could play tricks with the memory) there was something about him, something she couldn't define. Just this once Meryl was going to put aside her usual practice of relying solely on her own observations, concrete actions that she could know for herself were true... she was going to go with her gut, and her gut told her that the person Vash had brought back slung over his shoulder like so much baggage was bad news. It wasn't anything she could put her finger on really, just a feeling she got; something in her told her in a voice like someone pointing out that 'hey, the suns rose in the east and gravity attracted two masses to each other' that Knives was no friend to her, and if he ever managed to get his hands on her the resulting mess would probably require a mop and bucket to clean up.

_I should listen to what my common sense is screaming at me to do and pack my things and get the hell out of Dodge_, Meryl thought.

But she categorically _refused _to be a coward. She hadn't ever backed down from the dangerous or frightening things she'd faced until now and she refused to back down now... especially not to some petty tyrant throwing a temper tantrum because he didn't get his way.

She weighed what she should do.

On the one hand, this wasn't her fight. Vash and his brother had been battling each other over the ultimate fate of humanity for well over a century now all by themselves and she doubted that either of them would look favorably upon her interference in the matter. Knives in particular. She wasn't good with things like this and she'd probably just end up making a bigger mess of thing. The last time she'd stuck her nose in, the day Legato had overtaken her and the town, she'd messed things up severely.

_I think I made the wrong call on that one_, she thought regretfully with regards to the aftermath.

True, she'd repaired his coat, and made him something to eat so that he could heal and feel better but when it came down to the moment that he'd needed her most... she'd failed him.

_I'm such a coward_, she berated herself.

When it came to the moment where she had to help him figure out a way to make it through she hadn't been able to know what to do or say to make it so that he could endure, hadn't been able to give him any comfort or solace.

_Yeah, you just fled the room on some flimsy excuse and left him alone to deal with it_, she recriminated herself. She was the worst friend.

She'd heard his screams, felt that deep yawning chasm of pain and despair open up on the other side of the door. A despair so deep that it had frozen her in place and sapped her strength. She hadn't been able to move, or even cry out. She'd just stood there, resonating helplessly with his pain. She couldn't help it, it had been just like That Time--

She cut her thoughts off, she really didn't want to think about it, didn't want to make comparisons. Making comparisons to _him_, even after all of this time, still cut to deep to festering wounds that were too painful.

_Still_... she tried to cheer herself up. After all, worrying about it after the fact never changed anything.

_I did what I could_.

She'd known from hard, sad, life experiences that her words wouldn't reach him. Nothing she could possibly say to him would make any difference at all. After all, her poor father had never changed his mind no matter how she'd tried to encourage him and Meryl didn't think that Vash's case was so very different. Something in him had broken and nothing she could say or do was going to fix it. Pain stood on its own. Still...

She'd left her precious book of Tennyson poems on the tray, open to In Memoriam. Maybe she couldn't help him, but the words had always brought her comfort and solace in times of sorrow. They hadn't helped her father, but given what had happened, her father had probably been beyond _anyone_'s help; the Lingering listened to no-one and nothing, it consumed until there was nothing left. Maybe it was _that _moment, when Vash didn't give up on himself, that he had really stolen her heart.

Meryl knew that he would leave her to fight his brother; Vash had simply been pushed too far.

_I honestly can't imagine how he's made it through all of these years_, she thought with a feeling of new admiration for him. It was a little strange to think of that idiotic, freeloading goofball as someone to be admired, but the things he'd been through would certainly have broken a lesser man.

_And he still manages to appear so cheerful and upbeat_, she thought, shaking her head in wonder. She knew that it was partly a mask, a mask to hide his pain and his sorrows, but at the same time he just seemed to live on the hope that things would get better. It almost made Meryl wish that she was an optimist. Almost.

_I should come up with some sort of back-up plan, just in case whatever Vash is planning on doesn't work out_, she thought.

Meryl had ever been the cautious one, and she was a firm believer in hedging her bets when she didn't have a sense of the odds. She was a woman who liked things plain and obvious and... dammit, NORMAL! Things that were even a little outre tended to make her feel uneasy, the same sort of collywobble-feeling that one got from standing at the edge of a cliff and looking straight down. The feeling that sent shivers up the spine and made her want to shrink away until she found someplace safe.

_There really is no place safe_, she argued with herself. _Safety is an illusion anyway. You're better off just facing whatever the hell scares you and dealing with it, that way it doesn't have power over you._

Brave words.

_I'm such a hypocrite_, she acknowledged ruefully.

_I'm not running away, not this time_, she vowed. _I don't care how dangerous it is, I'm not just going to let that man do what he wants. I know I can think of something. I'll find a way to stop him if or when he decides that he's not willing to play nice._

Meryl wished that she could have the faith that Vash did in the inherent goodness of people; but she seemed to have been born with a pessimistic nature and she was a firm believer in always having a contingency plan ready just in case things went bad (as they so often did). So she would wait, and watch and hope until the day they knew one way or the other. If everything worked out as Vash hoped, well and good. If not... they were going to need a miracle, and she'd need every advantage she could get.

* * *

**Ah, and the plot thickens, a little more anyway. Just wait. Just wait. It only gets better.**

**P.S. Reveiws are love.. love me?**


	4. Close Your Eyes

Morning. Vash's internal alarm clock woke him at dawn, telling him it was time to get out of bed and practice his gunslinging, except now he had no gun to sling anymore. It was over, he'd fought Knives and won. So now what?

Habit nearly forced him out of bed but he ignored the urge for once, why not sleep in? He couldn't remember the last time he'd slept in, even when he'd ahd a hangover from staying up drinking half the night before he'd still be up with the suns, practicing the skills that would keep him alive. He shut his eyes, but a severe twinge from his shoulders when he moved to pull the thin coverlet over his head prevented him from rolling over. The twinge reminded him that while he had _technically _won, there had been a cost to the victory.

Vash turned his head and looked at the unconscious form of his twin brother in the cot next to him. He had entered deep-trance, a coma-like state that they could use to heal their bodies more quickly. This was the closest he had been to his brother in over a century and it was a sad commentary on the state of their relationship that Vash felt so _very _relieved that his brother was unconscious. Who could blame him that knew their story?

_He looks peaceful_, Vash thought, a little taken aback.

When was the last time he'd seen his twin look peaceful? Certainly not for well over a century, perhaps not even since they were children. Vash wondered if he should count the casual and cheerful greeting his twin had given to him over the dead body of Rem's single remaining decendant slumped over on its desk and bleeding from a gunshot wound to the head. But that look had quickly dissolved into rage so perhaps it didn't count after all; the rage had lasted from that day to this one.

_It'd be nice if we could get along_, Vash thought wistfully.

There had to be a way to get his brother to see reason, there just had to be. Knives was the logical thinker, the planner of the twins. He had been using his particular skills to give his brother hell for the last few years, but Vash hoped to change that. The problem with Knives was that he firmly believed that he was a thinker, and that any conclusion he reached using his skills of logic had to be the right one. He thought that he allowed no emotion to sway him, no intuition to slip through the cracks in his tower of logic and so any appeal to see things using the blurry lense of abstracts like "morality" and "right-or-wrong" were inherently flawed. Whether Knives wanted to see it, whether he wanted to admit it or not, his conclusions were based just as much upon emotions as Vash's own were.

_"Killing the spider to save the butterfly," feh!_

Vash gave up trying to shut his eyes and go back to sleep, his mind wasn't going to let it happen.

"...and we're gonna have a good time. No-one's gonna take that time away. You can stay as long as you like... So close your eyes..."

Vash blinked in surprise. That sounded like Meryl, but it couldn't be, because she was singing over breakfast. Meryl was never anything approaching cheerful early in the morning. Meryl was almost never anything approaching cheerful at any other time either. Amused, occasionally; but chipper, perky, upbeat or any other synonym pertaining to cheer... hardly.

_I'm awake now_, he grumbled to himself. He was one of those people who couldn't fall immediately back to sleep once roused too, so rolling over and shutting his eyes wouldn't do any good. Besides, there was food out there and nothing in here so...

He looked at the bare metal ladder-back chair that he'd thrown his clothes over the night before and noticed that they were not there, but had been replaced by new garments, neatly folded. Someone must have been in to collect them already which was odd indeed that it hadn't woken him up because Vash was definitely _not _in the habit of not waking up when there was a strange presence near him while he was sleeping, his survival instincts were just too well honed for that.

_I must've been more tired than I thought last night_.

Not surprising, trekking for a good three days with a weight and mass on his back _exactly _equivalent to his own would make anyone tired. Still, he'd been just as tired, even tired and drunk, _before _without sleeping so deeply. There was no real reason why he should have slept so soundly as to not be aware of a forieghn presence, even a familiar one, in the room while he slept. No reason but that odd and undeniable feeling of... safety, of having reached a haven, a place where he was at last secure. Of having come home. Safety was an illusion, he of all people knew this, an illusion that was easily shattered, but it was one that everyone who could clung to. He had cast it aside many years ago as being one that was too costly to maintain, not just for him but for everyone else around him, he hadn't felt truly safe since those days with his brother and Rem and the crew on the seeds ship where they'd grown up. Until now that was, he felt safe and at peace here with the girls.

_How long will that peace last, I wonder_?

Vash shrugged to himself; it would last as long as any peace lasted... as long as it could. For now, there was breakfast to attend to. Vash had the feeling that if he wasn't out by the time it was done, Meryl would come in here looking for him. He smiled a little at that, she was ever the stickler for protocol and punctuality.

When he visited the bathroom off the side of the room he shared with his twin now he was mostly unsurprised to note that there were fresh towels and his shaving kit had been laid out. A quick shower, a shave, and clean clothes later, vash emerged in the kitchen to see Meryl expertly flip over a pancake on a griddle and rinse the used batter bowl in the sink while the other side finished cooking. There was a small stack on a plate nearby, each of them pretty near to perfect.

"Hey," he greeted. "G'morning."

"Oh, good morning," Meryl said over her shoulder as she started washing the few dishes in the sink. He noted the few changes in the place since he'd stayed there; a bowl full of fruit on the counter, a sat-feed radio nearby, and two little bowls on the floor, one filled with water.

"There's pancakes if you want them," she added unneccessarily, Vash was already helping himself.

"Just make sure to leave some for Millie, you know how she likes pancakes." Meryl was done with the dishes in short order.

"Aren't you going to have some?" he asked.

"I'm not much of a breakfast person," she admitted. She poured herself a cup of black coffee from the percolater and pulled an apple from a nearby bowl of fruit.

The pancakes were thick and fluffy, and very filling. Vash poured liked to have a lot of syrup with his; what was the point of pancakes without getting to enjoy the sweet stuff after all?

"Would you like a little pancake with your syrup?" Meryl asked ironically after noting how he drowned his.

"Nah, this is fine," he replied in the same vein.

While he commenced consuming his food, Meryl pulled a pen from a nearby cup full of them and a small pad of paper and settled into a chair nearby. Her pose was one of thinking for a few minutes then she started writing down, after the first few words it was apparent that she was composing a list. Vash flicked his eyes over the meagre contents; potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, lettuce. Food!

"There's no donuts," he noted a hearbeat later. That should be at the _top _of the list.

"Those are extra," she said firmly. "I'll only buy that if I have enough money after I've bought the things we need for the week."

Vash stared at her in uncomprehending horror; since when were donuts _not _considered a neccessity to continued life and prosperity? _Extras_? **Blasphemy**!

"Hmm... let's see, spaghetti one night... I'll need noodles, and tomato base, I think Sella's got her herb stand this week so there sheould be fresh oregano," Meryl muttered.

Ah, a woman with a system. She was planning the meals they were going to eat for the next week in advance and only writing down those food items that they were actually going to be using. This was vastly different from Vash's method, which was to troll down the aisles with a partly broken shopping cart and grab things at random off from the shelf because they looked interesting, or he might figure out how to make something with them later (most of the time the food went bad before he figured out something, or if it was canned, he moved out of town before he used it). Until his insurance girls had come along, the vast majority of his diet consisted of things that came from roadside vendors, bars or donuts.

"Chicken and fresh curry spice would be nice," Meryl continued to muse aloud to herself. "I'll have to see if she has any, if not I can use the chicken in casserole I guess, should I add casserole noodles then? Hmm, what else?"

"There's donuts," he suggested. Meryl shot him a look for his suggestion and very ostentatiously ignored him.

"I know Millie likes meatballs with pineapple, I think we need bell pepper with those too. Almost out of coffee..."

"How is coffee a neccessity and donuts are extra?" he demanded next.

"Have you ever seen me without my cup?" Meryl replied, a sharp, feirce smile (more like a silent snarl) on her face.

"No, I can't say as I have." he said, his survival instinct telling him that maybe he was walking into a trap.

"That's probably the only reason you're still alive," she replied.

Vash blinked in open surprise. Had she just made a joke? Yes, yes... Meryl had just made a joke!

"Vash? What are you looking for?" she asked a moment later when she noted him glancing worriedly out the window.

"Fire and brimstone outside, I think it should start raining any minute now," he replied honestly.

Meryl's brow furrowed in confusion but she let it go with a shrug, dismissing it as his usual lunacy.

"Is there anything _besides _donuts," she stressed when she saw his eagre look. "That you want to have for dinner this week? I only have three meals planned, one night might be a fend for yourself but that leaves open another two."

"Do you know how to make veggie fries?" Vash asked next. He didn't mention that they'd been a specialty of Rem's, who had in fact been a vegetarian.

"With zuccini, asparagus, carrots and green beans, right?"

"You put asparagus in yours?" he questioned by way of reply.

"Tastes better that way," she said firmly. "It's really more of a side, what else with it?"

Vash thought for a moment.

"Pasta maybe?"

She added it to the list, along with cheese and balsam. She wrote down a few more general things then set her pen down and surveyed the list, probably also doing a mental checklist of things she had or might be missing. Vash was leaned over her shoulder reading too, and her reached down to where she'd set her pen so that he could add something and his hand accidentaly brushed hers. He wasn't prepared however for when he was abruptly thrown out of his mind and into a scene very similar from this one.

_It looked like it was going to be another bad week for him, Papa had barely come out of his room at all this last week, even when she'd told him about the prize she'd won for spelling. She'd make his favorites, all the new ones because the recipies from Sarah just tended to make his depression worse. Papa was depending on her so she needed to take care of things. So they'd need sausage and rice, beans..._

Vash tore his hand away with a start, suprised by the knowledge that had come with the sudden vision; he hadn't been seeing it from the outside, it was more like he'd been living the memory along with her. Meryl had been twelve at the time, had just finished cleaning up the kitchen after doing her homework and was settling down to write out the grocery list of food items to buy at the saturday market the next day. That sort of thing was normal for her.

Vash might have gained some knowledge "by osmosis" or simply in context of the memory, but the picture was far from complete. Her father had been sick, maybe? Meryl was accustomed to being responsible and somehow that made him feel sorry for her.

Meryl too was coming out of her short reverie with a slight shake of her head and a small frown, she dimissed it. She looked up and over her shoulder at him, unaware that he'd accidentally touched her mind, and smiled a little at him.

"I didn't forget," she reassured him, as one might reassure a child. She added donuts to the list with a small flourish.

"Milly!" Meryl called down the hall. "Time to get up, we'll have to make it to market before they close."

There was silence for a long while and Meryl called to her partner again, tentatively then walked over to peek into the room. She backed out a heartbeat later and carefully shut the door softly behind her. At Vash's questioning look she explained

"She's still tired. I know she was up late last night writing the Milly Monthly... and..." Meryl heistated amoment and then went on.

"She has trouble sleeping lately, so I want her to catch up on her rest while she can. I'll take care of this."

_She's a terrible liar_, Vash reflected ruefully.

Meryl had probably walked in on Millie taking a moment to grieve privately in her own room. Milly was the type who didn't like to worry others with her own problems, but everyone needed to take time to mourn the loss of someone they cared for.

Meryl was going over the list again and a moment later he came to understand why.

"Why are you taking the heavy stuff off the list?" he questioned a moment later.

"Well I'm going to have to carry all of the groceries back with me by myself," she said sensibly. "I'll just come back for the heavier stuff later in the week."

"I could carry it for you," he offered a heartbeat later.

"I dunno," she said dubiously.

"Hey, I'm very strong," he said, pitching his voice to sound like a tomas-dealer extolling the virtues of his wares to a reluctant buyer, posing and preening exaggeratedly for effect. "These arms can lift a hundred pounds easy!"

Feeling unusually mischeivous, Vash scooped her up off the floor bridal style, bounced her once in his arms, and then set her back down gently before she could even react with anything more than widened eyes and an undignified sqwawk. She weighed hardly anything at all! She was maybe just over a hundred pounds, and that was fully clothed with shoes on!

"Hey!" She scoleded, looking affronted at his cavalier treatment of her person. "Don't just pick me up and sling me around like a sack of potatoes!"

"You vant I should varn you next time?" he replied, deliberately hamming it up to diffuse her sparking temper. Her lips twitched a little, even as she tried to retain a serious expression on her face.

"If there is a next time, I'll snap your other arm off and beat you with it," she warned saucily.

He recognized the threat for what it was, Meryl trying to retain control of a situation with her precious lines and borders and that prickly personality of hers. Still, he pretended to cringe (mostly for her benefit) and promised to behave himself.

"Are you sure it's a good idea though," she asked when she seemed satisfied that he'd been sufficiently cowed. "What about our new, ah, houseguest?"

"Knives won't wake up for a while yet," he promised her. "Not for a few weeks at the earliest. I can certainly nip out to the market with you for a while. Besides, if I'm going to be eating your food, I should help put it on the table."

"Finally! _Progress_!" she muttered. "That may be the first sensible thing I've heard you say in a while."

"Ouch, Short Girl. Ouch," he said a moment later.

"Let me leave a note for Millie so we can be on our way before the pickings get too slim. The early bird gets the worm you know."

"That's why they call me an early riser or even occassionally mister up-and-at-'em," he said enthusiastically. He got an eye roll for his antics as she was jotting down her note.

* * *

Knives' floated, semi-somnolent, in a glowing sea of white. A song surrounded him, not so much a sound but a feeling of sound washing through him vibrating every molecule in his body like a harpstring next to a tuning fork. It was a soft sursuration of intermingled whispers, a chorus of sighs with a faint intermingled melody from a thousnad voices melding as one. The ebb and flow of the wind sighing through the trees branches mixed with an omnipresent choir of voices all raised in joyful song.

He could loose himself forever in the all-pervasive feeling of peace and tranquility, here in the dreaming, in the place where all minds met his sisters lived in quiet peaceful tranquility unknowing and uncaring (for al that he could tell) of the world that went on around them. He could resonate with this precious song, join with these voices and hear their individual strains wrap around him, become one with him, define him and form him anew. For a breif moment he considered doing just that, to obey the siren call to surrender himself to the greater force, shed his shell like a snake discards a useless skin it has outgrown and join the faceless formless chant that was his brethren.

But he had a duty. His brother would never see, never understand what he needed to understand if Knives did not enlighten him and show him the way. He thought that the humans were all precious simply because they were living, he willingly and knowlingly turned a blind eye to their faults and flaws; turned away from the fact that they were greedy and selfish; parasitic creatures who thought only of the moment, and could not even begin to grasp the idea of a life centuries down the line. He thought that the occasional bit of kindness could redeem them; but even thier kindness was self serving. Weak, pathetic, blind... they were a virulent cancer on the face of this world, parasites who fed and fed upon the energy of his brethren, offered nothing in return, only consumed until they had drained every last spek... then, like a plague of locusts, they moved onto the next.

There was a strange jarring note in the song, a low hum of dischord in what had always been a perfect harmony. It had felt almost like a protest, but that was not likely; when he tried to communicate with him the same way he communicated with Vash, he had never gotten any response other than a vague feeling of welcome, wrapped around a vague feeling of confusion. When he had been regenerating himself those fifty-some years after the events of July Knives had kept to himself for the most part, there would be plenty of time for a chat with his sisters once he had freed them and unleashed them from thier glass prisons. It was odd, but he often felt like there was something that they were interested in unfortunaltely, since he couldn't actually talk with them, he couldn't find out what it was.

-_Don't worry, my sisters_,- he sent out into them. -_I will save you_.-

With a final sigh to fortify himself, Knives kicked his way to the surface, fighting past the soporific tide of torpor and into true sleep. There came a sudden uprush of whispers, as if his sisters were protesting, but he regrefully turned away; he still had a duty after all. Vash may have won this round, but Knives would win the on-going war. He had to; for his brothers' sake... for all their sakes.

He would have to start over; almost completely from scratch. He had thrown nearly everything he had at vash in an attempt to wear him down. Legato was supposed to be the final straw that broke the camels back, Vash was _supposed _to be demoralized, weary and hungering for someone who would understand and make all the hurting go away. And Knives would make all the hurting go away.

Instead, Vash had met his brother, clear-eyed and cheerful as ever he was, whole in his heart and detirmined that humanity was worth saving. Knives intended to find whoever the hell was responsible for _that _particular development and bury them.

_The human's you are so fond of brother, they will consume you too_, he thought, as he started to internally speed up his healing and regenerative functions so that he could get out of healing torpor faster and begin his work.

_They've already begun; carving away at bits and peices of you. How many times have you been hurt by them, betrayed by them, let them cut into you and hurt you just so you could save one short, poinless life that flickers out almost before it even has a chance to be born. Every scar is a reminder of their true nature, that they are trecherous, self-serving and destructive. I will rid the world of thier infectious plague_, he promised himself and his twin silently.

First, he would have to heal, and then.... then the real work began.


	5. Livin' On a Prayer

Milly tried not to feel too relieved at the sound of the door to the little house they were staying in shutting softly with the two other fully conscious occupants of the house on the other side of it. She was glad to have work and be surrounded by her friends and all, but sometimes she needed a little time to herself to just let it hurt.

"Let it hurt and let it heal." That had been her big, big sisters advice to her in response to the last Milly monthly that she'd sent out. The Thompson clan might be big, and a lot of them had diaspora'ed out in order to help the farm when it fell on hard times, but no-one could say that they weren't all tightly knit and supportive. The response to the news had been a comfort to her in her grief. The man she'd fallen in love with was gone, but her family was still here and her friends were still here and they all loved her, so really, it wasn't so bad.

The hardest times were the mornings though. In that time between waking and sleeping she could still sometimes pretend that it was still that night, and that when she opened her eyes he would still be there beside her. Her body would fool her into thinking he was there, the soft spicy, slightly musky scent of his skin on the sheets, the smell of sulpher and gun oil on his hands, the heavy-sweet smell of tobacco clinging to his hair and on his breath. That the sheets were warm with his body and not cool from the chill air of the night. But then she opened her eyes to see the suns rise on another day and her bed was cold with only her in it, and alone with only her own scent in the air.

There were some mornings that she just rolled over, hugged her pillow closer and went back to sleep. Milly wasn't big on mornings in the first place, she couldn't see how Meryl and Vash could abide them, an opinion shared by _him _on more that one occasion. Apparently he was more of a morning person than he'd claimed to be, because she'd awoken to find him already gone.

It hurt, not having gotten the chance to say goodbye. It left things feeling unfinished, like she was just hanging there despite her grief and someone would come along and say... oops, sorry, our mistake! But she knew it wasn't so, Mister Wolfwood was dead and there was no changing that. Perhaps if there'd been a funeral, things wouldn't feel so incomplete, but there hadn't been time for a funeral other than the one Vash must have given him to bury his body. It seemed awfully unfair of him to just bury the man without even asking thier help. And then there'd been the trouble with Legato and they'd all had to move from that place shortly after that.

Milly just kept moving, kept working, kept busy so that with all the work and occupation her sorrows wouldn't hbe able to catch up to her and overwhelm her. Now she knew what was up with her sempai's obsession with spending every single minute of every single day occupied with some form of work or another. It helped to make the pain not so bad. But there was that still quiet hour just before dawn when Milly could swear she could still feel him there. Her grief crept up on her at that unguarded morning and reminded her that she was still there, still there without him.

& & &

The Saturday Market wasn't anything to write home about really, a collection of stalls containing food grown by local farmers and craftworks made by the local artists. Still even at this short a time after dawn the place was already bustling with customers; housewives with their children helping to carry parcels, peppered liberally with newly wed couples; the husband holding a basket while the wife picked through the produce. There were even the occasional lone single males looking through the wares offered, probably to take their crusts home to eat in woeful solitude.

_Hey_, he thought brightening a little. _We look like a couple_!

He looked from himself and Meryl to one nearby blissfully contented newly-wed pair browsing through the selection of foodstuffs and commenting on what they would eat for dinner that night the young man holding the basket while the young woman piled her selections in it. It was the season for weddings and Millie had said that there had been more than a few in the past month or so that he'd been gone, Meryl had only commented ascerbically on the number of bachelor parties she'd had to clean up after.

Vash was holding the basket, while Meryl was inspecting a tomato with an eye sharper than the gaze of an eagle, looking for any fault or flaw, however minor, in the produce she was buying. He felt a goofy little grin stretched its pleased way, unbidden, across his face; they looked like a _couple_. He was a little surprised that the idea caused him as much elation as it did, back in the early days of their travels, if she'd hauled him off to go shopping with her he'd probably have been whining about it and trying his best to slip off so he could go play in the streets with the kids. In the present however, being here with her and looking like a couple made him feel less inclined to spend his time somewhere else.

"Top o' the mornin' to ya, missus!" The vendor greeted, having just finished up with another customer nearby and ready to move on to the next. He was a red-haired giant of a man, freckled, with large, hard hands accustomed to hard work. Irish descent obviously.

"Good morning Mister McLeary," Meryl greeted in return. "How's Mellie?"

"She had to stay home today, youngest has a bout of the cough," he replied. "I see you've finally settled on a beau for yourself."

He nodded to Vash, who straightened, trying not to look pleased (that would probably only set her off). Meryl blinked for a moment and then looked back at him and spotted the basket she'd dumped on him. A small smirk of a smile tugged at the corners of her lips as she replied

"It's more like he's my beast of burden... er, I mean _escort _of course." Her tone gave it to be understood that she felt the first term was the more accurate one.

She was teasing him! She'd just slid that one in there with all the subtlety of a dagger to the ribs.

"Hey!" Vash protested the obvious slight on his skills as a gunman. Meryl ignored him, looking amused at her joke and pleased that she'd gotten the point in this round.

Once she had finished making her careful selections the haggling began in earnest. Short Girl and the vendor might be on friendly terms, but when it came to money they were both of them all business. The price was settled quickly, Meryl was a sharp customer, but she knew what was fair and they both soon settled on a price that left neither of them feeling cheated.

They walked slowly to the next vendor on their list, passing by a stall that sold cloth, leather, needles, glass beads, and thread, another stall that sold nothing but various sizes and shapes of knives. The vibrant background sound of a marketplace in full swing was like an impromptu song, the drumbeat cry of vendors hawking their wares underpinned the lighter notes of women haggling over prices and the flute-like sounds of children laughing and playing nearby. People almost seemed to dance around each other.

"I visited a market just like this in Windy Point once," he remarked, as they both paused to watch a display at a market corner; a young boy, thin and hungry-looking with two short sticks was using them to twirl a long baton in circles and toss it high into the air. He didn't look like he was making much money, the pile accumulated in the hat below him was small. on a spread-out blanket nearby sat a young girl who was obviously his sister, a collection of "trinkets" bits and pecies of scrap metal twisted into little bracelets odds and ends strung onto twine to make necklaces spread out rather hopelessly at her feet. A customer, watching the show and not minding where he was going, bumped into Vash.

"Scuse me," he mumbled, ambling on.

"No problem," Vash said, waving a little.

"It was back before it became a minor metropolis, when it was still just a small village," he went on. "Anyway, I wasn't out and about in it for three minutes when some guy lifted my wallet!"

"You mean... like that guy just did?" Meryl pointed out, nodding her head in the direction of the careless customer that had bumped into him a moment ago. "Good thing you don't carry any money on you, Vash."

"The joke's on him anyway," Vash said smugly, giving a casual flick of his wrists, and five tiny purses full of coins flickered into his hands. Meryl eyes widened in surprise, and suddenly a full laugh burst out from her. She looked just as surprised at it as he did at it, but he quickly joined in. It felt good.

In unison they both looked at the hungry pair of siblings, trying their best to make an honest living, by unspoken mutual consent they had decided that the task of tracking down the original owners of the purses was nigh impossible, so there was something else that could be done with the excess cash. He tossed her a coin purse and she wandered up to the young girl, inspecting her wares, while Vash discretely deposited all of the coins from the purses into the hat the young baton twirler had set out for "busking" and they met a moment later.

"If we can't find their original owners," Meryl said, looking over the clumsily braided copper bracelet she'd bought. "I think that's the best thing to be done with it."

"I dunno," Vash replied. "With as easily as you've tracked me down sometimes, I wouldn't put it past you to be able to actually _find _the previous owners."

"Thank you," Meryl said looking surprised and pleased at the compliment.

Two kids suddenly went barreling by them, shoving Meryl out of the way in thier haste for the follower to catch the leader, Meryl was tipped abruptly off balance and Vash moved automatically to catch her.

_She has such a large presence most times, with that temper and attitude, that I often forget just how small she is_, he thought absently as he caught her. She was maybe an inch above five feet and probably only one hundred and seven pounds.

_I'll bet I could circle her entire waist with both hands and have room to spare_.

She was so tiny. Maybe he should speak to her about finding another part-time job _other _than as a waitress, there were a lot of rough types that hung out in saloons and she wasn't wearing her cloak full of derringers when she was in her waitress uniform; the tiny costume didn't leave a whole lot of place to conceal a weapon (or anything else for that matter).

"You okay?" he asked, steadying her with one hand on her shoulder and the other one holding her bare hand...

He felt a strange pulsation, not quite like a squeeze, but like a tiny subtle vibration along all of his senses, and then found himslef unaccountably irritated.

-_...kids, their mothers should teach them better manners! They might not have mothers; I should go after them and scold them so that they know better_.- She turned away so that she could do just that but Vash tugged back on her hand.

"Don't bother," he said. "They're just kids, that's what they do."

The irritation slackened off to be replaced with a feeling akin to chagrin.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to fall right into you," she apologized. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah," Vash said, covering up his embarrassment at having accidentally intruded on her thoughts with a large smile.

"I'm fine, you don't weigh anything at all really."

"I hope that's not just you trying to get on my good side," she said wryly.

"No," he said with blunt honesty. "You really don't weigh much. I could easily pick you up with one hand. Now I'm a little worried, the outlands is no place- er," he caught himself, sensing her spark of defensive irritation. Her temper was beginning to heat up at the implication that she couldn't take care of herself in any and all situations.

_Please don't let me ruin this_! he thought in near-panic. Maybe it was just his imagination but he thought he saw her posture straighten for a minute.

"I mean, I know you can take care of yourself, and you know you can take care of yourself, but this place is rough and there are a lot of rough types out here that would see you as..." he trailed off trying to find a delicate way to say "prey." Instead of getting offended, Meryl smiled wisely and nodded her head in agreement.

"That's true," she said. "It kind of funny now that I think of it; we have opposite problems."

Vash looked a question at her.

"Well, you're really tall and most times when you have your coat and gun on, you look like a gunslinger... sort of."

"Sort of?" he pursued.

"Sort of, when you're not dancing around making an ass of your self," she teased. "Or getting shot down by women with your pathetically lame pick up lines? Your poor dead girlfriend? Where do you get these lines?"

"Hey! I worked hard on that one!" he protested.

It was true too, it took real creativity to come up with something so pathetic that it screamed loser in neon lights. There was nothing quite so pathetic than to watch some dork continuously strike out using the most impossible schemes ever. Meryl seemed to have at last hit upon the real object of his game which was not to actually get a date, but to add another layer to the so-pathetically-harmless-he-couldn't- possibly- be the -right-guy act.

"You have to work really hard at appearing to be harmless, you spend all this time and energy putting on this big act to make yourself look like the worlds biggest goober-"

"Hey!" he yelped, a little stung. Meryl wielded words of blunt honesty like surgeons wielded scalpels.

"Shut-up Vash, we both know it's true," she said not pausing to skip a beat. "Where as when people look at me, they see this tiny harmless little woman who probably couldn't put up a very good fight and looks about the right size for slinging over the shoulder viking-style. I have to pour a lot of work and energy into getting people to see that I'm something to be reckoned with so that they'll leave me alone."

"Has anyone been... bothering you?" he asked next as the thought occurred to him. He ought to work on that brain to mouth filter more.

"Well, not so much anymore as when I started," she said with another smile that looked what he might describe as "_relishingly malicious_".

"I've got them all pretty much trained by now," she continued, sounding amused. "Sometimes there's a new one that comes through and doesn't know the rules, but if they're not quickly advised by another patron, or they see me as some kind of challenge, I just give it to be understood that familiar handling of my exquisite self will not be tolerated. They tend to back off pretty quickly when confronted, provided of course, that they are still _conscious _afterward."

"Right."

What else could he say?

_Not a woman who needs a white knight, that's for certain_, he thought a little ruefully. In fact he could easily see Princess Meryl as the type who would tell the prospective rescuer precisely what he could do with the horse he rode in on.

"So where to next?" he asked.

Meryl looked around then smiled a little when she saw his nose twitch at the delicious and familiar scent of donuts wafting its way to him.

"Wel-l-l-l," she said, pretending to think hard about it. "We've already completed most of the shopping for the next week, so I suppose... we should just go home."

"But..." he mumbled disappointedly, looking longingly at the stand near the entrance where someone was prepping for the fryer. They smelled so nice. "But..."

He turned his best puppy-eyed look on her, the one that had always gotten Rem to cave like a half-baked quiche and let him have more time watching vids (or whatever it was that he was after). He could tell by the slight suppression of upturned corners at the edge of her mouth that she was already intending to give him what he was after, she was just drawing it out a little bit.

"Hm, but since you've been such a good beast of burden today, I guess you've earned a carrot or two." Meryl promptly marched off toward the donut stand, leaving Vash to hurry after her, before she changed her mind.

& & &

Meryl looked at Vash and at the empty box that had until recently contained two fresh bakers-dozens in some small amazement.

_The man can probably eat his weight in donuts. It's his superpower_, she thought, wondering why watching him pack it away so quickly and easily never quite ceased to amaze her. Where did he put it all? Until recently she thought he stashed some of them under his coat for later or something. But, given his very active lifestyle doging bullets and running away from bounty hunters, he probably burned through all the calories faster than something really fast.

He sighed happily with repletion as he finished off the last donut. He was sprawled out on the old wooden porch swing that came with the tiny little house they were renting and closed his eyes with smile.

_Nice to be able to make someones day_, she thought feeling a little amused. _If he didn't have so much trouble that came with him, Vash would be very low maintenance; all he needed to keep him happy was a place to sleep, no sign of threat and a box of donuts._

_He still reminds me of my brother in a lot of ways_, she thought with a rare feeling of fondness.

When she'd first realized that the goofball that had seemed so much like her troublesome, lazy, too-charming little brother who had never done his chores or his homework and had always run to her to help him at the last minute was to be her permanent assignment Meryl had _detested _him. "Why did it have to be him?!" she'd demanded of the world at large. To her, Vash had been stamped from the same mold as her younger brother; that of an irresponsible, trouble-making, Holly-Go-Lightly of a man with no consideration for the people around him and no thought to how much trouble he made for her with every mess he got himself into with all the crazy stunts he pulled simply because they seemed like they might be fun at the time.

_I was always cleaning up after him_, the old feeling of annoyance mixed with exasperation, mixed with love, mixed with simple irritation. Her brother had never learned of course, and even when she'd taken the time to try to illuminate to him the errors of his ways, he'd just laughed it off or annoyedly told her to stop lecturing him. Then she'd have to go to twice as much trouble to either make sure he learned his lesson well, or try to mitigate the damages. She was an old hand at mitigating damages, it was one thing that made her such a keen disaster investigator.

When she'd first realized that Vash was actually the man she'd been assigned to twenty four hour surveillance on, she'd taken what she'd observed of him in their unfortunate associations beforehand and added it to the previous experience with her brother and had not been a _bit _happy with her conclusion. She had known then and there that this guy was nothing but trouble.

_I had no_ _idea_, she thought with a small wry head-shake.

She remembered the after-party in May City, where she had made her displeasure with the arrangement perfectly clear to him. "If you get too close and he bites you, don't expect your insurance to cover it." It was sort of funny, she hadn't at all expected to like him, especially not at first. He had been too much like Marcus; always into trouble, a notorious flirt and skirt-chaser (her brother, she knew, had passed two-timing and went straight on to three timing, too charming for his own good). She couldn't point out _exactly _when it had happened, when Vash had turned from being that annoying guy who reminded her of her brother to Vash her unexpectedly good friend.

_Why did I have to go and fall in love_? she grumbled to herself, it was a foregone, if annoying, conclusion and Meryl was just barely honest enough with herself to acknowledge it.

_Men! They always complicate things_!

Then she reconsidered that statement. Vash in a nutshell; not human, has a homicidal sociopath for a brother that's bent of wiping every human being from the face of existence, plus has a sixty billion double dollar reward on his head that people were trying fairly consistently to collect. Yeah, well maybe it wasn't _men _in general that complicated things, but _him _in specific.

"Here," she said when they had put away the groceries and she noted that he was headed back towards the room he was now sharing with his brother. "I'll show you where I've stowed the medical supplies."

"Thanks," he said. Meryl put them in about the same place that everyone else seemed to put them; in the bathroom. Perhaps it was because bathrooms were the rooms that came closest to reminding people of the pristine, white neatness of a doctors clinic, with their tiled floors and waist high counters, without actually being a doctors clinic.

As Vash sat down at the side of his brothers cot to take a look at his wounds and change the bandages again, Meryl peered curiously over to see what his twin looked like. She hadn't actually seen him yet, just his outline when Vash had him slung over his shoulder. He both did and did not look like his brother; his hair was lighter and his face, even while peaceful had a somehow sterner edge to it. Their features were very much of a piece, though they clearly were not identical twins.

Funny, he didn't look like a monster, or anything scary. He looked like a regular person, more handsome than many, but still... ordinary enough.

"Yeah, he doesn't look like he'd be the cause of so much trouble does he?"Vash said, in an uncanny echo of her thoughts.

"No, not really," Meryl agreed. "Maybe it's because he's not awake to start causing trouble. I mean, you yourself look peaceful enough when you're sleeping that no-one would ever guess that just an hour before you'd been responsible for getting half the buildings of the town blown away with bullet holes."

"Oh? And just when have you watched me while I was asleep?" Vash pounced, completely catching her out in something she'd had no intention of admitting to him.

"Um..." she tried to think of something, quick.

She absolutely did not want him to know that she'd kind of made it a strange hobby of hers to catch him napping. She hadn't meant to, but once she'd gotten a taste of getting to look at him as much as she wanted to without having to say or do anything about it, it had turned out to be surprisingly addictive.

"You were sick... that time," she said hurriedly.

She hated bringing up the painful subject, but it was her best defense. And it was also true, sadly enough. it had been one of the few times she _hadn_'t enjoyed watching him, because she'd known that he was greiving deeply, she could feel it, even through the many layers of sheilds and the drugs blocking her... peculiarity.

"Meryl," he said quietly, actually saying her name instead of the usual nick-name like Insurance Girl or Short Girl.

"Yes?"

"I don't know if I ever thanked you," he said softly. "For everything you've done for me."

Meryl honestly didn't know what to say to that, she couldn't very well blurt out the truth, that she had done it because she cared about him... this was neither the time nor the place for things like that and there was still so much left unsettled. She couldn't answer with a non-chalant reply like "it was nothing" because they both knew that she'd gone to a huge amount of effort on her part to get him safe and healed up. She also couldn't say that she was just doing her job, because fixing his coat by hand didn't fall anywhere within her job description. Finally, she just settled for

"I was happy to help."

* * *

**Yay! Another update! Please reveiw and look forward to the next chapter. I know it starts a little slow, okay, a lot slow, but it'll be worth it, I promise.**


	6. If You Only Knew

Knives was sleeping peacefully, his face stern and solemn, untroubled by the world that spun by without him.

He even frowns when he's sleeping, Vash thought to himself, shaking his head a little.

He pulled up a chair next to the bed and pulled back the blankets so he could check on the bullet wounds. They were healing nicely, and fast. That last was only to be expected, he and his brother could heal from almost anything (and Vash probably had done so at one time or another in his life) twice the rate of the average person. A cut that might take an ordinary person days to heal up from would only take hours for them.

Which only means that he'll be waking up in a little while, wondering where he is and why I brought him here, Vash thought. Why had he brought them here? It was crazy, Knive's mental powers would probably return even before he was fully healed and Vash couldn't hope to win a battle fought on the psi-battlefeild. He was putting the girls at risk. If he let anything happen to either of them Woflwood would surely kill him properly whenever he finally did die. And yet... and yet he couldn't bring himself to do what was probably the smart thing and find someplace isolated and safe where he could wean his brother off his psycho-hormones or whatever is wrong with him.

_Besides, even if I tried to, she'd probably just track me down again_, Vash thought cheerfully. _Then I'd **really **get a lecture._

Meryl when she went into lecture mode was more than a match for anything. A girl like that would probably just take Knives by the ear and _nag _him into submission. The image of Meryl grabbing his brother by the ear and berating him was a very satisfying one for some reason. Amusing too. It became quickly less amusing when he thought of his brother's probable reply to the attempt... torture, scary-looking assassins, cities blown from the face of the planet.

_What was I thinking_?! he demanded of himself. It was one thing to show habitual mercy and compassion in the heat of battle, but now Vash had to think of a way to deal with the aftermath. He was supposed to save Knives... well how the heck was he supposed to do that?

Knives didn't feel he needed to be saved. He didn't feel that he'd done anything wrong. The only way Vash was going to be able to save his brother was to convince him that he'd been wrong in the first place. If he hadn't managed the trick of it after a hundred plus years, how was now supposed to be any different?

The only thing Vash could think was that it would have to be. This was the first time in decades that the two of them were actually going to be able to sit down and talk, this might be the only chance he'd get to make it work.

"Begin as you mean to go on," he muttered to himself.

That had been the rationale behind bringing his scociopathic murdering twin back in among normal society. Maybe if Knives was transplanted from his safe, contained environment on the outside of humanity and made to join in their reindeer games, he'd see that they weren't so very different after all. His best hope was the girls; kind, observant and utterly unflappable Milly, and stern, protective, capable Meryl. If Knives didn't reform after spending time around the two of them, there really was no hope for him.

"Hey Mister Vash!" Milly called cheerfully. "I saw the groceries, Sempai was supposed to wake me up to go shopping with her. I guess she must have taken you instead. Did she... say anything interesting while you two were out?"

"Um, no..." Vash said mystified as to why she was feigning casualty. "Just the usual, 'Vash stay out of the streets, you're going to get your clothes dirty' and things like that."

"Oh," Milly said, sounding disappointed.

Vash couldn't understand why that might be, but he figured that it was probably an insurance girl thing. Milly ducked outside and brought in the mail from the mailbox at the front of thier house.

"So, what have you two been doing while I was away?" he asked curiously.

"I got a side-job for the township, digging a new well," Milly said. "And you know Meryl got a side-job as a waitress. She doesn't like it very much, though. She says that she didn't put herself through college so that she could do menial work. But on the other had she says that it reminds her of her college days."

"Held down a job as a waitress while she went through college eh?" Vash said. Yeah, that suited her. She seemed like the over-acheiving type that could hold down two jobs plus an occasional and still be able to make top marks on her tests.

"Yep," Milly confirmed. "Sempai's really good at math and science."

"How about you?" he questioned curiously, suddenly coming to realize that despite all of the time he'd traveled with the two girls, he didn't actually know a whole lot about them.

"Oh, no, I'm really not that good at either of them," Milly admitted cheerfully. "I look at all those numbers and it makes my head spin. And those equations just put me right off."

"So how'd you get involved in insurance? I mean, no offense, but you always struck me as someone who'd be more at home on a farm or something like that."

"Well I am," she said. "I miss being back home, my family and all my relatives own a ranch just outside New Saptimber, in the Delfier Valley. We got into a bit of financial trouble and most of the younger cousins, me and Tommy and Jak, and Horis, and Tory, and Selda, and Mik, and Donny, and--"

"So all your cousins then," Vash interrupted when it sounded to him like Milly was perfectly willing to list _all _of her cousins that had diaspora'ed from the family ranch to find work in towns.

"Yeah," she said. "Well, we all decided that we'd go ahead and get jobs in town to help pay back the debt."

"I didn't know your family was in financial trouble," Vash said, suddenly feeling bad for not having asked about it sooner.

"Oh we're not," Milly assured him. "Not anymore anyway. Meryl's better at math, it seems, than our solicitor was--"

Vash read between the lines on that one. It would seem that the solicitor had been skimming a little off the top of the hard working Thompson family.

"After she reviewed his books when she came to visit us for Landing Festival, he suddenly found urgent business in another county," Milly said, sounding utterly mystified as to why that might be. "Strangely enough he hasn't come back, or even written. I hope he's okay."

:_Oh, Milly_,: Vash thought with an internal headshake.

"Was that before or after you two started working together?" Vash asked.

"After. Sempai was really hard to get to know, you know? I mean, even for most people who have her same rank she was real standoffish. Everyone says she's "prickly" and hard to get to know," Milly shrugged at that and added. "Daddy says he had a tomas like her once, a real proud beast, he was the smallest in the herd and the other horses tended to pick on the poor thing, he told me. But instead of putting up with it like most Tomases would, because of the herd-mind they have, Temper fought back and it made him real ornery. Daddy says that even he couldn't break and back the critter with a saddle, so he tried sweets and being real nice to it, special attention and stuff like that. Temper was Daddy's tomas until the day he gave out, he even won races! I remember him pretty well, even now the ranch doesn't seem the same without him."

"So you tried taming down Meryl the same way your daddy got Temper to be his friend?" Vash ventured. With special attention and sweet things.

"Mm-Hmm," Milly said gleefully. "And it worked too, eventually anyway. Mister Vash..." Milly looked oddly intent. "Meryl really likes chocolate."

"Oh, does she now?"

"Yes," Milly said, still sounding strangely intent about it. "She really, really likes chocolate."

"Is that right?"

"So much so, that she'd do practically anything to get a hold of some." She continued staring hard at him, as if willing him to understand something from the intensity of her gaze.

"It is hard to come by," Vash agreed, not getting what she was trying to tell him.

Milly looked hard at him for another moment longer, but then seemed to give up, and sighed.

"Oh well, " she murmured to herself. "I guess there's just no taking the indirect route. I'll have sempai do her best."

Vash looked blankly at the non-sequiter but dismissed it from his mind a moment later.

"I'm going to go check on Knives again," he said. "He seems to be getting better, and I wnt to make sure those bandages don't stick."

"Right right, let me know if you need anything."

:_I wonder what that was all about_,: Vash thought to himself as he sat down in the chair beside his brothers cot and pulled back the light blanket he had covering Knives.

He dismissed it from his mind as he very carefully sat his brother up and began to unwrap the bandaging around his torso. Knives didn't so much as flinch, he was in a heealing sleep, a sleep-trance like state so deep that nothing short of immediate threat to life could wake them from it, it was when the body seemed to just re-route all power and functioning to healing the injuries on its person. Vash had "enjoyed" the state on more than a few occasions, the longest period of time probably having been the time he'd gotten the grating in his chest. he'd stumbled into Max's office, and counted on the secret Sky City agent to get him where he needed to go, he'd lost a significant amount of time after that because the next thing he knew, he was coming to in a hospital bed and it was three months later.

Vash made an impressed noise, even at his best _he'd_ never healed this fast before. Knives four injuries were three-quarters of the way healed, with no sign of infection. Even more amazing was that even though he'd clearly been injured, the wounds were leaving behind no visible scar to mar his beautiful flesh. Sheesh, better at his powers, able to summon his angel arm at will, able to heal in half the time it would normally take Vash (and Vash was a fast healer) without even a mark on him... Knives was just better at being a plant than his twin brother it seemed.

:_Too bad it doesn't make him a better person too_,: Vash thought, perhaps a bit petishly.

He loved his brother, he truly did, but it was getting harder and harder to forgive him as time went on. With every choice Knives forced him to make, it got harder. Vash didn't want to hate him, he didn't want to stay angry with him, but the incident with Legato had made it clear that if they didn't find some way to resolve things one way or the other they were either going to have to kill each other, or fight each other until the stars burned out in their orbits. Vash had had enough fighting. Maybe he couldn't live the way Rem wanted him to, maybe there was no-way to really save them both, but he couldn't let Knives do what he wanted, sacrificing one for the good of the other. That wasn't something he could really bring himself to believe.

He unconsciously clenched his right hand, his gun hand. Time may have eased the burden a little but his muscles still remembered the way the gun had recoiled in his hands, as if jumping back in shock from what he'd done. The light final sound of a body crumpling sideways to the floor after the thunder-clap of the retort rang out had sounded incongruously soft in the stillness. His heart remembered, his body remembered, how long would it be before he could forgive again?

& & &

It wasn't over, not by a long shot.

His brother thought he could "reform" Knives? Sentimental garbage! He might have won the battle, but Knives intended to win the war. There was no way that he was going to allow his brother's mistaken veiws to entrap the both of them. Bad enough that Vash had let them carve away at his body bit by bit over the years, worse still that he now insisted on living with the vermin, but now Vash actually thought that because he'd won that meant that he was right.

Knive's had tried to go about it the hard way, he really had. He'd tried to make his brother see, to bring him to understand the simple truth that those creatures were parasites on the face of the universe and deserved to be eradicated. Vash wouldn't listen to him; he'd always been a stubborn one but Knives could be equally stubborn. He loved his brother and his other siblings trapped inside those soul-sucking containment spheres more than anything and he would no longer let them be taken advantage of. His sisters couldn't fight back, and Vash didn't understand who the real enemy was, so it looked like it was all up to him. He wouldn't turn his back on his kin. He wasn't going to give up.

-_Flame, Hissing_,- he summoned peremptorily, calling with his mental powers to the two he had standing nearby, waiting for his commands.

It sometimes amazed him how naive his brother could be, with all of the effort that Knives put into his clever plots and planning he had been surprised to discover that Vash had thought that the Gung-Ho Guns he'd faced and defeated had been all that he had. He would have thought that his twin would have known better than that; Knives was a planner, a thinker, and no good strategist ever put all of his eggs in one basket. Of course he was going to have a back-up plan in place! (In the unlikely event that his brother should actually manage to win.)

The original plan had been to defeat his brother and bring him back with him, broken in spirit, and nurse him back to health. The time together would resstablish thier bond, as well as enable Knives to cement the correct convictions in his brother's mind and Vash would come to see that Knives was right. Then they could go on to rid the planet of the infectious disease that was humanity together and free thier siblings from their prison.

-_Master_?- asked, their response relayed to him via his most faithful ace in the hole.

-_You shall come to the town of LR_,- he said. -_Raze it to the ground, kill everyone. Keep my brother occupied_.-

-_Yes Master_,- they said, he could sense thier pleasure with the orders he had given them. Let them be pleased, it would give them something to die for; after all they were only secondary squad members, therefore they were expendable. (They were _all _expendable, but some more so than others.)

-_Legato_,- he "said" to the one who was relaying his commands.

-_Yes Master_?- he asked next.

-_Have you assumed control of your new body yet_?-

-_He struggles against me still master, but I have control_,- Legato replied.

-_Arrange for transportation, we shall leave as soon as I am well enough to move. Being surrounded by all of these parasitic scum disgusts me. Even the presence of my brother cannot alleviate it_.-

-_Very good Master_,- he replied just as he should. He paused and then added

-_Shall I have the rest of the auxiliaries summoned to await your commands master_?-

-_That goes without saying_,- he said, irritated at having to explain himself to such a slow witted thing who could not even learn to anticipate his masters commands.

-_Yes Master, please forgive this one's unworthiness_.-

Knives heaved the mental equivalent of a put-upon sigh.

-_See to it_,- he all but growled.

Pain made him more irritable than usual, and if had hadn't considered the usefulness of his servant beforehand he probably would have simply mentally flayed the telepath for the satisfaction of it, but unfortunately Legato was more useful to Knives in control of a new body. He could carry out Knives' orders for one thing.

Knives went over his mental plan and found an interesting angle, first was the body that his servant now occupied; it would probably be very useful to him in the future but second was the notion that if Knives was going to have to endure the company of human servants for a while yet, he might as well bring along a hostage to his brother's good behavior. Another angle occurred to him, fast on the heels of that notion. Not only a hostage, but a distraction as well. If the human vermin that Vash allowed to nest with him were going to distract his brother anyway (and the shorter of the two certainly seemed to be doing an excellent job of it) it might as well be in a way that would benefit Knives!

-_Pick one of those human women who follow my brother around and acquire her_.-

-_Master_?- his tone was almost, but not quite, surprised.

_-He will fall more readily into my plans for him if he is distracted with worry for one of those little creatures. I know he is quite fond of the things_.-

-_Do you have a preference_?- Legato asked.

-_I don't care_!- Knives snapped, irritated. -_They won't be traveling with **me**, whoever you assign the task will bring the creature back with them.-_

-_Is she to be harmed, or do you prefer to make him watch_?- Legato asked politely.

Knives considered the question. It was a matter of cost-benefit ratios. Making his brother watch wouldn't help his plan in the long run, unfortunately; for while it would indeed make his brother suffer, it would also harden his heart and mind further against the truth that Knives wanted to make him see, as well as make him even more certain that Vash's beliefs were the right ones. Vash would certainly react to body parts delivered to him one by one, on the other hand he would probably be willing to jump through several hoops (but not the one "hoop" that Knives wanted him to, unfortunately) in return for his promise to return the chit to his care, unharmed.

Legato had in fact been there at the moment when Knives had at last achieved a breakthrough...

_-A question first_,-Knives decided on getting more information before coming to a decision on the matter. -_Were his servants the deciding factor in his decision to kill you, or merely tertiary to it?-_

Legato considered the question for a moment. Finally he said

-_If his servants had not been there, I believe the events would have played out precisely as you had meant them to anyway, but... he certainly would have taken far more time about it. It was when I harmed the two of them that he became resolved to take action_.-

-_Hm_,- Knives mulled that tidbit over in his mind for a minute or two, considering the angles and came to a decision.

-_Tell the agent assigned to the mission that the chit he absconds with shall not be harmed, for now. If she resists, simply drug her_.-

-_Which base do you wish to have me prepare for your arrival?_- Legato asked next, Knives noted that in the back of his mind his servant was already running down a mental checklist of things to be gotten ready; linens to be aired, the med-lab to be prepared, a cell to be selected...

-_Have you broken that creature I ordered acquired just yet?_- he asked next.

-_No master, it is unusually strong willed,_- Legato replied. Knives felt another flash of irritation... it was so hard to find good help! Did he have to do everything?!

-_Very well, I will attend to it myself_,- he said in annoyance. -_You're useless to me_.-

-_Yes Master, shall I be punished for my uselessness, if you like_?-

Knives momentarily weighed the satisfaction he might derive from ordering the servant to flay himself, but human bodies were so weak and he would take longer than Knives would like to recover. Besides, the pain might make it more difficult for Legato's mental parasite to maintain control of his stolen body.

-_No, not yet, the matter will wait until I am away from this hell hole_.-

-_Very good master, any further instructions_?-

-_Hurry up_.- And with that he cut out.

* * *

**Heh heh heh. Reviews are love (and usually help me to remember to edit and post faster)...** Love Me?


	7. You Get Me

Vash looked up into the endless blue sky of the day. It had seemed like forever ago when the world had seemed to hold this much promise. He tried to live everyday he could with verve and enthusiasm, taking time out for the things he really enjoyed in life like eating donuts and playing with kids to teach them the value of love and peace. With all of the guilt and sorrow he carried with him, with all the knowledge that he would forever live his life on the outside looking in, it was that much more important to him that he have something to fall back on, something to remind him that there were things out there that were worth living for, worth fighting for, and that it all wouldn't only be sorrow and heartache, that there were things that made life good.

Now there was a distinct possibility that maybe he'd finally found the end of his troubles. If he could manage to convince his brother to see Vash's point of veiw, there was the chance that all of his days would be ones of endless blue and happiness. Things could finally be starting to go right! Vash wasn't certain how, exactly he was going to convince his brother, but there had to be a way. Once Knives woke up, Vash could sit him down and get him to see somehow... he just knew he could.

He was distracted from his half-baked plan to save his brother by the sight of one of his housemates walking down the street, returning home from the part-time job she'd taken to help support him and his brother while they stayed there. Part of him felt like a burden, he was making these two girls work to keep him and his brother fed and housed while he just loafed around all day waiting for his brother to heal so he could teach him about the good side of humanity.

Milly waved cheerfully at him once she was within sight. She was strong, the tall insurance girl, with a tremendous desire to live and see her friends happy. She was not just a physical foil for her partner but an emotional one as well, bringing her own brand of simplicity and observation to their two-woman team. Meryl was generally all business, not a woman who let her heart rule her head and she sometimes needed to be reminded to think with her heart every once in a while, Milly was there to remind her. The sisterly affection between the two was obvious in the way that Milly seemed to take it upon herself to get her elder partner to open herself up now and then, and in the way Meryl was so protective of Milly. Vash thought that if it came down to a choice between someone harming Milly and someone harming her, Meryl would throw herself into the path of a bullet without any hesitation whatsoever. Vash hoped it never came to that.

"Hey Mister Vash," Milly greeted when she reached the front porch where Vash sprawled out on the swing and let his long limbs stretch out.

"Hey Milly," he said in reply.

"Whatcha doing? I thought you'd be inside."

"Knives is the same now as he was ten minutes ago," Vash said, mentally checking on his twin in his deep healing sleep.

"I meant helping sempai," Milly corrected.

"She chased me out of the kitchen," he said, smiling sheepishly. It had been surprising, Meryl was actually faster with that wooden spoon than Vash was... and he could dodge bullets! He could dodge bullets, but when he was caught with his finger dipped in the sauce Meryl's wooden spoon snaked out faster than a sand-snake striking and smacked the offending fingers smartly across the knuckles. And she never missed either.

"She has eyes in the back of her head," Milly marveled right along with him, nodding. Clearly a fellow sufferer of the Meryl Stryfe Wooden Spoon of Doom. "She's pretty territorial when it comes to her kitchen. You know it was Meryl who cooked that meal at the Schezar Manor?"

Vash's eyes widened, it had been quite an impressive spread, certainly it was one comparable to how the wealthy and upper class who could afford professional wait staff ate. So she was some kind of closet chef?

"I know that you two were hired on for a time, but I thought that you had been working under his cook or something."

"Apparently most of his staff left along with everyone else," Milly said. "It was just the two of us there. I got all the water I could drink. And let me tell you, after going that long without water then finding that dried up well, I was more than happy to cook for my drink! Who'd have guessed that he was really feezing up the water in the spring and keeping it for himself to sell? He seemed like such a nice person."

"Yeah," Vash agreed. He wondered how he was going to broach the subject without coming off cackhanded. Vash's usual method was to blunder his way into things but matters of emotion required tact and delicacy and he was not long on either of those two things when it came down to it.

"Sempai's a very good cook," Milly continued. "You like to eat, don't you mister Vash?" It was strange, but if he didn't know any better he'd have thought that Milly had come out with a purpose in mind.

"Eh-heh, yeah," he said, still trying to figure out a way to broach the subject. "What man doesn't like to eat? I gotta say, since you two have been traveling with me, I've been eating better."

That was certainly true; in many of the places where they'd stayed for any significant amount of time Meryl had insisted on a suite with a kitchenette in it so that she could "have a decent meal for once" she tended to dismiss the stuff from roadside vendors and restaurants that Vash called his staple fare with a disdainful sniff. That was fine for a temporary situation, she seemed to feel, but if you didn't cook it by hand it was only something to subsist on.

"That was before we all started traveling together," Milly said, sounding a little wistful. Vash missed those days too. Despite the pain and the battles and _dear god_ the thing that had happened at Augusta, there had been plenty of good things that had happened.

"I remember the time Mister Wolfwood gambled away his favorite pair of sunglasses and asked me to win it back for him," she said with a smile. "It was funny because when he said he was my servant for life, sempai took him at his word and made him wash the laundry. There he was for the rest of the afternoon, up to his elbows in soapy water scrubbing away. She told him to consider it his penance for gambling. I think she just wanted someone to do the laundry, sempai hates doing laundry."

Well, Vash couldn't ask for a better opening than that.

"Hey big girl?" he asked, a little hesitantly.

"Yes?" she replied.

"How are you... I mean, how're you holding up? Really?"

She looked over at him with those bright, cornflower-blue eyes, so much brighter than Knives' and, certainly more compassionate, and said

"I'm... getting by," she said honestly.

There was a sadness there that hadn't been there before and Vash was sad to know that just a little bit of her innoscence was gone due to her association with him. If she'd never met him, would she have remained that innocent forever?

"I'm sad he's gone, and I'm missing him, but I don't regret it either. How could I?"

A typical Milly answer, and Vash couldn't help but smile a little. Typical Milly.

"I miss him too," Vash said.

It felt oddly good, if one could ascribe that word to feeling awful, to actually be able to share a time of grief with someone else. When Rem had died there had been no-one left to mourn her besides him (and Knives, the instrument of her death, had been unsympathetic). There had been others whose deaths Vash had mourned all by himself, many of them, over the years. It had been rare that he'd been able to grieve for the passing of a friend with another friend. Vash's friends were few and far between; he'd wanted to give his brother as few a number of hostages as he could.

"What's for dinner?" he asked next, after a long moment of silence in which they said everything they needed to say. Milly didn't regret it and Vash wasn't to blame himself. Now as far as he was concerned if you could still eat that meant that you were alive for another day and should start acting like it.

"You saw," Milly reminded him. "Meryls making pasta with sauce, she makes very good sauce and asparagus on the side with hondaise."

"Should we go and drive her crazy?" Vash invited.

"She'll come after you with the spoon," Milly warned him.

"Yeah," Vash agreed, grinning. She was cute when she was angry. Milly shook her head at him, clearly able to right through him to his aims.

"You go ahead and have fun," she said, fondly. Vash smiled and went inside.

* * *

:_It's strange_...: she thought to herself. :_Ever since that day there's been something odd going on inside me. I've been noticing things that I shouldn't be able to notice_.:

Like in the crowd earlier that day when those boys had brushed right by her, it had seemed like she could actually feel what it was they were feeling for a brief moment, but of course that was impossible.

:_Then again, my definitions about what is and is not possible seem to be changing since I started traveling around with Vash_,: Meryl thought a little wryly. Maybe his weirdness was contagious?

It felt like she'd had a head cold for the last several years and now, suddenly, it was clearing up. The world seemed strangely more distinct to her now, as though there was a veil over her eyes that had been making everything blurry and now it was slowly being lifted and all those vageu shapes and impressions clarified into true forms. Meryl tried not to allow a shiver to run up her spine when an vague echo of memory tried to nudge its way into her consciousness; her father had once told to her "the allegory of the Cave" from Plato's the Republic. It was a theory about how all of humanity was shackled to the inside of a cave, and the only things that they could see were shadows from the world outside the cave playing upon the wall. The story had questioned whether anyone could truly understand the nature of reality if all they could make out was merely the form of it and not the substance.

Instead of dreaming about Legato last night, she had dreamed about her father. It had been shortly before she'd woken, so the dream had stayed fresh in her mind, the story he'd told her had stayed with her, and so had the vague feeling that there was something else, something more that her fther had been trying to tell her. She recalled very that they' been down in Crackback Canyon and that when she had looked down at her dream-self, her legs and wrists had been bound in shackles and all around her were drifting shadows. At the end of the dream, one of those shackles had started to slip loose.

Her new sensitivity to people warned her that there was someone in the room, even though she couldn't be certain how she knew he was there.

"Don't even think about it Vash," Meryl said, smiling a little as she dug in the pantry for the dry noddles she'd sealed away in a container earlier. She could tell that he was right near the stove, and if he was right near the stove then he was thinking about trying to sneak a taste of her sauce.

"Nuts," he muttered. "I can't sneak anything by you, can I Short Girl?"

Meryl didn't dignify the remark with a response. It went without saying of course.

"Anything I can help you with?" he asked next.

"That depends," she replied. "Is your definition of "help" doing something useful around the kitchen, or do you just want to stick around hoping I'll turn my back so you can get into things?"

Vash affected an injured look, mixed with one that clearly said 'you can't possibly suspect harmless little ol' me of such duplicity could you?'

"Uh huh," she grunted, knowingly, while trying not to smile. "But if you really want to help, you can rinse out the asparagus in the sink and put them in the steamer."

Vash went over to the sink and there was the sound of softly dribbling water. She frugally placed her spaghetti-noodle pot under the faucet to catch the rinse water, the asparagus came to the market pre-rinsed and the secondary washing was mostly a precaution, but it didn't do to waste water.

"So," he said into the companionable silence. "What do you do when you're not being an insurance girl?"

"I'm always an insurance girl, twenty-four hour surveilance means exactly that Mister Vash," she pointed out. "Trouble doesn't take a day off, unless you decide to sleep in." She had a sort of sly teasing glance out of the side of her eye.

"Ouch," he said dryly.

"The truth hurts," she commiserated mockingly, even going so far as to pat his shoulder in mock sympathy.

That was two for her and none for him.

"Nice," he said, ackowledging her hit. "But seriously, you must have some hobbies. Sewing perhaps? You did a good job on my coat, real neat and even stitches."

"Thank-you," Meryl said pleased at his compliment. "But no, sewing is something I do more out of necessity than enjoyment. I learned how to sew neatly because I pride myself on competency and self reliance... and because we didn't always have the extra money for new clothes."

That last was added with reluctance.

"Money tight when you were growing up?" he asked next, curious.

"Sometimes," she said vaguely. "Not so much when I got older, but as a young child, there were times when we had to scrape by."

"You don't talk much about your family. Even Milly doesn't seem to know a whole lot about them," Vash remarked.

"Stir the sauce please, I don't want it burning to the bottom," she said, her tone firm and instructory as she turned away to put the pot of water on the stove to heat up. Vash gave her a long look even as he did as she bid. The look said 'my, now you got off that subject quickly enough.'

"It's nothing bad," she defended reluctantly. "Just a typical story on this world. You asked about my hobbies earlier?"

Meryl knew that he was noting how she very much did not go into the details, or even the general outline of what that "typical story" of hers might be. She knew deep down that it was only making him even more curious.

"Well, I like rock-climbing," she said. "Spelunking too, actually, I like spelunking a little more than I like climbing cliff faces, because I'm not out in the sun so much, it's nice and cool down in the caves. My papa and I-"

She broke off unconsciously, and swallowed, feeling habitually for the little lump that was always there in her throat. Time, it seemed, had at last diminished it or at least made it so that it stayed firmly in her heart. She could practically feel Vash's avid interest, his piercing gaze trying to peel back the layers around her and look at what was happening inside of her.

"I grew up in the canyons," she explained, her voice and posture probably a study in defensive reluctance, but she felt she owed him this much at least so wether she liked it or not, Meryl forced the words out. "And my papa really loved to be out of doors so I was raised that way as a child. He was an avid rock-climber too, so we did that a lot together."

"Wow," he said, his eyebrows raising in surprise. "I actually never would have guessed that about you, you're so tiny. But maybe I should have, I mean, now that I think about it, it suits you completely. I can just see you clinging tenaciously to the side of a cliff by your fingernails, completely not willing to give up until you reach the top. It really suits you."

She smiled a little at that.

"I already know all of _your _hobbies," Meryl teased. "Let's see, when you're not dodging bounty hunters and saving the world, you like to let schoolchildren climb all over you like a jungle-gym, scarf down donuts at a local cafe and find ridiculous new ways to pick up women. And let's not forget your prodigious appetite for all things booze-related. Oh, and the lazing about too, let's not forget that either."

"Heh, sound's like you've got me figured out," he said, scratching behind his head and giving one of his empty smiles.

Somehow she'd managed to offend him, or maybe she'd poked at an open wound or something. Meryl was no good at talking with people in general, talking to them was another matter, she could get stuff _done_! But dealing with them as people rather than professionals was something that she wasn't so good at. And Vash was a mystery at the best of times, he seemed so simple, but he had such surprisingly complex depths, she didn't think that even a bondmate would be able to understand him fully... certainly his own twin didn't and that was with the help of the twin bond.

:_Idiot_: she thought, feeling a sad little pang, she'd meant to have a little fun with him, try to cheer up the suddenly serious atmosphere in the room. She hated people prying into her past so maybe the words had come out sharper than she'd meant. Still, she could fix this... maybe.

"Feh!" she scoffed straightening her spine and lifting her chin confidently. "You're darn right I do! I also know that you can't ever seem to fold up a shirt but your socks always match, that you like peas but hate green beans, and that you think there's something seriously wrong with people who mix their food in with their mashed potatoes." (An Irish custom of which Milly was fond.)

"If we're naming my personal habits, you forgot that I clean my gun every Wednesday," he pointed out.

"Well yeah, but you do that out of necessity rather than because you want to so it doesn't count as either a quirk or a hobby," Meryl replied primly. She couldn't hold in the amused little smile that snuck its way onto her face. She tried to press her lips together to keep it in, but it willfully quirked away at the corners of her mouth, and when Vash's head snapped around to look at her in surprise, Meryl helplessly started to laugh. Vash joined her a moment later.

"Oh, so we're getting started on quirks now are we?" he said with a glint in his eye that Meryl couldn't entirely trust. "Well that's good because you have enough of them to fill the cargo hold of a SEED's ship."

Meryl gasped in offense.

"I do not!" she replied hotly. She was not quirky. Competent, temperamental and determined yes, but never _quirky_.

"When you're writing your reports," he said, grinning. "You won't write them without your typewriter, and even then you'll only use it if the surface it is resting on is perfectly level."

"A wobbly desk is a distraction," she defended.

"And when you sharpen your pencils, you always have three of them and they are always sharpened to the exact same length, if one is shorter, you'll file the other two down until they match. And then you'll line them up perfectly beside each other exactly three inches from the right side of your typewriter," he said, very very clearly enjoying himself.

When he put it that way, she did sound a little quirky... it was just that she liked things nice and neat and organized.

"Oooh! I have another one," he said a heartbeat later. "When you wash the dishes, you follow an exact order that is never deviated from; first the cups and then the bowls and then the plates then the smaller pans followed by the pots and last the silverware. And if someone tries to put them on the drying rack "wrong" you'll move them until they're right."

"Well..." she said helplessly in the face of his amusement of her apparently quirky nature.

:_But... it's where they go_!:

Meryl cocked her head to the side in recognition of the fact that she was probably a little O.C.D. about some things because she was always vaguely irritated whenever she came out into the kitchen after Vash had washed the dishes and left them piled on the rack any which old way.

"And you don't like your food touching," he added. He was very clearly enjoying himself, poking fun at her little oddities.

So she was quirky, so what? He had some strange ones too, and after having traveled with him for about three years off and on, she was aware of some that he himself probably wasn't aware of.

Like whenever he was really upset, he reached immediately for the sunglasses. It had (sadly enough) taken Meryl a while to notice that one but once she did, she could always tell when things were about to get serious. Too bad she hadn't noticed that one back during the time he'd pulled off that bluff to save Jullian and Moore from that slaver caravan, then she wouldn't have laid into him like she had. Vash also had a funny way of flexing his left hand, the bionic one, when he was feeling self-conscious, especially around a room full of people staring at him for being Vash the Stampede. But she wouldn't tell them any of these because Meryl considered them "hers," she'd noticed them through long careful study and observation. She had in essence worked for them. The man could be inscrutable enough without her giving him his "tells" so he could block them.

"Well you," she said instead. "Always rub the outside rim of any glass handed to you, empty or full, with your right middle finger."

Vash looked at her in blank surprise.

"Do I?" he said, apparently not aware of it. Meryl nodded, somewhat smugly.

"And your pinky curls up under the bottom of your whiskey glass," she added, pleased with herself. "And you always pause for a second after you turn a door handle before opening the door."

Vash looked like he was examining his memories a little and wondering if she was right. Then he looked... sly? Yes, there was definitely an air of something about him she wouldn't call it quite smugness, but it was something akin to it. Meryl wasn't sure what it was.

"Wow Short Girl, that's quite a list you have there," he remarked, his tone was one of admiration but it had the slight ring of falsity to her that whispered to her inner Meryl sense that she was being set up for something. Meryl narrowed her eyes at him and waited for it.

"I mean, I wasn't even aware of the whisky glass one," he added.

"I pride myself on my skills at observation," she said, a little on edge, just knowing her was setting her up. "Twenty-four hour surveillance and all that."

"Still, that's a lot of observing, I mean... I can fully understand, me being such a good target for a woman's eyes and all." He flexed ala "manly-man pose" and tried his best to look dashing.

Was that it? That was the set-up? Weak! And easily shot down.

"You being such a good target, _period_, Mister Vash," she said, slipping it right in there. He was going to have to do better than that.

"Ahhg!" he said, miming a shot to the heart and a dieing gasp. "But seriously, if you've noticed all that, you must not be able to take your eyes off me."

His posture was that of someone preening with victory.

:_Don't start your victory lap yet mister_,: Merl thought with an inner smile as she took aim and fired.

"Because every time I do, I spend the rest of the night filling out paperwork," she replied, miming something crashing downwards and spreading out in destruction.

Vash hung his head in defeat, she had an answer for everything. It was a nice moment of smiling playful... it was almost like _flirting_.

"But I'm curious, since you brought it up," Meryl said genuinely a moment later. "Aside of the obvious ones, do you have any hobbies you enjoy? Secret talents or--"

Meryl shut her mouth quickly at the devilish grin that flashed onto his face, he waggled his eyebrows suggestively at her and said

"Secret talents? I have _lots _of them..."

Meryl raised an eyebrow and tried not the blush at the innuendo. That really would make this little conversation they were having a lot more like flirting.

"I'm serious," she said, pushing on his arm softly. "Like, have you ever... oh, taken up knitting or something? I mean you must have something you like to do on those long bus rides or when you're out in the sands."

Vash paused for a long moment, looked over at her mildly, then admitted

"I like to fold paper."

Meryl looked at him blankly. Actual _real _paper was a rare commodity on this world, the sheets she used for her reports were plas-film, the typewriter didn't use ink, but had a special magnetic pattern on it that made the word form into the plas-film. Paper was hard to come by, and he liked to fold it into squares or what?

"Here," he said grabbing a nearby napkin. "I'll show you. It doesn't work as well with these but..."

With quick deft hand movements Vash folded the square into a triangle and then into another, did some more creases and with a final flourish wound up with with a three dimensional bird figure, almost like magic!

"Wow!" she marveled, surprised. "That's really neat." She'd never seen anything like it.

"I can do lot's of other shapes too," he added proudly. "Flowers, rabbits, horses, bears, stars... all kinds of shapes."

She supposed that was what came with a lot of time to practice.

"Kids love them," he added. " I can do coin tricks too."

"How about card tricks?" she asked next, needling his ribs. "Ever get caught cheating at poker?"

Vash didn't dignify that with a response. Firstly, Meryl figured that if he were fast enough to dodge bullets there was no way anyone would ever be able to catch him pulling some slight of hand at a card game, secondly he rarely ever played cards in the first place and even then it was mainly as a way to pass time.

"So besides spelunking, any other hobbies you like?" he asked next.

"Well... there is one, but it's a little strange," she admitted. "Not many people are into it."

He could see a strange look cross his face and his tone was markedly cautious as he asked

"Do I want to know what it is?" there was a quirk to his mouth that told her that his thoughts probably were _not _as pure as the driven snow right then.

"Archery," Meryl replied, her tone repressive. "You know..." She mimed pulling a bow string back and loosing an arrow.

"Yeah, you're right, that is pretty obscure, especially here where you can't find wood so easily."

"My set was made out of fiberglass," Meryl replied. "I begged my papa for it, even though I knew he was a pacifist because it was just like--"

Meryl suddenly cut herself off having suddenly stumbled upon a shocking realization about herself. She looked over at Vash for a moment, her face taking on an "no, it can't be" look, then she glanced away to think about it again. She took a moment to process it, and prod it a bit in her mind and then decided, yes, that was indeed part of where she got the reference for it. She shook her head at herself and dismissed the matter from her mind.

Vash meanwhile was waiting for her to finish her sentence.

"Just like what?" he asked. "Meryl are you okay? You look a little odd there."

"Hm? Oh! Um, yes, it's just that... I suddenly realized something and it surprised me a little."

"What?" he asked curiously. Meryl shook her head, signifying that it wasn't very interesting so he probably shouldn't pursue it, but Vash apparently saw the embarrassed look she was trying to hide, and he chased after it like a sand fox down a chitter-hole.

"Aw c'mon, tell me," he smiled winningly.

"It's nothing," she insisted. She felt her face trying to smile even harder and she ducked her head and bit the inside of her lips, hoping the didn't look as embarrassed as she thought she looked. She wasn't embarrassed enough to get angry about it, but she didn't really want to have to explain it either. He'd never let her live it down. Never.

"It doesn't look like nothing," Vash said, cocking his head down to the side where she was trying to hide her embarrassed look, which of course only made it worse. Meryl turned away looking desperately for something else to do, but dinner was almost done but not quite done enough to let her escape.

"Well, it is nothing," she tried to insist. They both knew he wasn't buying it.

"Tellll meeee," he squeaked, then he pulled himself up and added. "Don't make me sing Henry the 8th."

"Anything but that," she muttered.

She hated that song, and he knew it. Vash cleared his throat threateningly and took in a deep breath.

"Okay fine!" she relented. "But you have to promise you won't laugh."

"I promise," he duly swore.

"Or tease me about it," she added.

"..." he paused. "Well, that I can't swear. But I'll tell you what, if you tell me this and I tease you, I give you full liberty to tell everyone else about the time I got drunk and woke up in the gutter with a litter of kittens in my trouser legs."

Meryl laughed out loud at the memory. She had been the only one of the four of them to find him the next morning, and he'd had the devils own time finding something to bribe her into silence with. She'd wrung a weeks worth of good behavior out of him, as well as a lovely new pen set.

"Only you, Vash," Meryl said in amusement. "Okay fine... I'll tell you what it is."

"I am the soul of discretion," he promised.

"Especially when I have so much blackmail material on you."

There was a small pause as she took the stuff off the stove, pulled the garlic bread out of the oven, and checked the asparagus spears.

"Well, my papa always read to me as a child." She wasn't able to not look a little wistful then, she'd loved the sound of his voice. "All the classics; Through the Looking Glass: and What Alice Found There, which to this day I am conviced had to have been written under the influence of opiates, Phantom of the Opera, Sherlock Holmes, Pinocchio... but probably my favorite one of all of them was..."

She paused looked over at him, her face utterly non-plussed, and looked away with an expression of "I don't believe this" on it.

"What?" he pressed. "I'm hanging here." Meryl sighed and admitted it.

"Robin Hood." Her tone said 'there, are you happy?'

At first, Vash didn't seem to catch the significance, then his expression cleared and transformed slowly as he then begun to see why it seemed to bother her. He looked, in a word, _gleeful_.

"Not a word. Not one word." she blushed.

Robin Hood, the story of an outlaw who risked life, limb and reputation to give people hope when times were hard. Oh, the _parallels_!

"Oh. No, I wouldn't dream of it," his face a study in confidentiality... except for the little smirk. She saw it, and she knew exactly what he was thinking. And he knew that she knew what he was thinking, which only caused the smirk to grow.

"I mean it," she told him.

"I know..." he drew out the pause, but apparently just couldn't resist. "Even at a young age, she has a--"

"Vash!" she snapped. He chuckled. She blushed and tried to hide it. He'd been about to say 'even at a young age she has a thing for outlaws.'

"Just put the bread on the table you goof," she said, sighing.

Vash just smiled, and did what she told him to.

* * *

**I like this chapter mainly because it was so fun to write. Please leave a review and tell me what you thought.**


	8. Trinket

Milly tried not to look pleased over dinner with the way things were going. There was definitely a good atmosphere in the room. Vash and her Sempai were getting along quite well. Mister Vash was pleased about something and every time Meryl looked over at him there seemed to be something communicated silently between the two of them. it didn't look like there had been a full confession yet, but the atmosphere was certainly promising!

:Sempai isn't the type to vacillate uselessly when there's something she wants: Milly thought to herself, feeling pleased with the way she'd arranged for the two of them to have a little time alone together.

Her senior at work was a real go-getter, it was that very drive and purposefulness that had enabled her to succeed so very well at a job that was considered by many to be a man's bailiwick. Mister Bernardelli was _not _in the habit of letting his office girls do dangerous field work, especially dangerous fieldwork that involved wanted criminals, but Meryl's impeccable record of service and incredible credentials spoke for themselves about her ability to handle it. The Chief had been practically forced to send her on the assignment, especially after what had happened to all the ones that had come before her (Meryl had been his court of last resort, and all the other A-1 agents who'd been assigned to the case had not been able to track Vash down and had given up and/or threatened to resign if not taken back to the city of December). There had been no-on else as qualified as her, and she'd been eager for it, so the Chief had reluctantly given in.

Many in the company thought that having Milly Thompson, a girl who was consistently late for work, significantly younger than many of her co-workers, and more often than not relegated to washing windows or other menial tasks for minor infractions against the rules as the partner of a Class A-1 Agent somewhat strange... but Meryl had insisted upon it. Most people thought that the only reason for that was so that Meryl had someone to boss around, but she had once come right out and told Milly to her face that Meryl knew that her one weakness of character was her apparent inability to get a read on people. Meryl could handle paperwork, she could handle a situation that had gone from bad to worse, and from worse to catastrophic... what she could _not _handle was people. If a woman who's house had just blown up tried to lean on Sempai's shoulder and start crying, Meryl all but shoved her off and jumped to the other part of the room! She relied on Milly to handle the human aspect of their work, and to notice details about people and thier reactions that she might otherwise ignore or discard as useless. Milly noticed a lot more than most people thought she did...

:_Like the fact that Sempai is... **different **somehow_: Milly thought.

Oh, she'd known for the longest time that Mister Vash was something other than ordinary, she'd picked that up even before they'd started traveling with each other regularly, what she hadn't realized was just how very out of the ordinary he was. The fact that he was something other than fully human bothered her not a whit, but the fact that he seemed to be using that as an excuse to try to subtly discourage her sempai from following her heart... now _that _was grounds for Milly perhaps having to go in and set things straight. Meryl had a hard enough time listening to her heart in the first place!

"What does your heart tell you to do Sempai?" Milly had once asked her, while they had been on a mission to mitigate the damages from a stampede of Shreikers and had had to choose between saving a town full of innocent people and protecting the interests of the company by protecting the property of one of Bernardelli's biggest financial backers.

"My heart and I don't talk anymore," Meryl had replied bluntly.

She'd saved the town anyway, and Milly had chosen take that to mean that Meryl only _thought _she didn't listen to her heart.

It had taken a lot of convincing, a lot of subtle hints, and more patience than would strain the endurance of a _saint _to get her elder to this point. She'd _finally _admitted it! After months and months, even years(!!) of holding out, Milly had finally managed to get her sempai to the point where victory and happiness were at hand for this most difficult of women... and Mister Vash was actually thinking about trying to hold out on this? Heh! Not if Milly had anything to say about it!

The mood was promising, but now... they just needed a little nudge. How to get them alone for a really long time...? Milly thought about it for a while then suddenly struck upon a brilliant plan. The more she worked it out in her head, the more she liked it, if this didn't tip things firmly one way or the other then...

:_Okay, well I'm not going to give up_: Milly admitted to herself.

She never regretted, not for a moment, having told the person she loved how she felt about him, it was now her mission in life to teach a woman she called her best friend, who always put everyone else before herself and tried to check her emotions at the door the way it felt to have love requited, and if that meant contriving all kinds of fun things for the two of them... so much the better!

"Mister Vash...!" she called.

No sense in delaying, after all. Once his brother woke up there'd be another obstacle in place. In the matter of love it would be easier for Vash to beg fogiveness than ask permission of his brother, if Meryl was already firmly paired off, then, while the other one might object, it was already a fait accompli.

& & &

"What's this about?" Meryl asked when Milly stopped her from dressing in her usual office attire.

As long as she was on the job she would dress the part. Now that Vash was back, they were finally getting regular paychecks from the company... they'd even got _bonuses _recently for a job well done, Vash hadn't blown anything up in weeks, no cities destroyed, no towns razed to the ground. The Chief was over the moons! Meryl was pretty content too, because the bonus had meant that she could give her notice at the horrid waitressing job (she despised working there!) and live of the salary sent to her by her real job.

The clothes that Milly laid out were rough, tough "around the house" clothes that Meryl reserved mainly for when there were heavy chores like painting or fixing things or work in the little garden to be done. No sense in ruining her office clothes with housework after all. They consisted of a pair of heavy fitted jeans, hiking boots, and a blue tank top she'd found somewhere.

"Oh nothing..." Milly said innocently.

Meryl wasn't buying it. The girl was up to something. Meryl raised an eyebrow, but wasn't senseing anything malicious so she decided to let it go. As long as it didn't involve having to do more chores right then, she was willing to let it go for the time being.

& & &

Vash wondered again if this was such a good idea. His brother Knives was healing rapidly; another week, maybe two, and he'd probably be awake if not up and around. Was it really wise to take time out from his bedside vigil just to go out and have fun? What if something happened while he was away? What if Knives woke up and Vash wasn't there?

Vash tried to dismiss the uneasy feeling in his stomach. Knives was still days away from being fully recovered, Vash had checked his himself that morning, the wounds were coming a long nicely but were quite a ways from being anywhere near healed. He'd tried to get a look in on his brother's mental state again, just as he'd tried last night and the night before that, and the night before that... so far there was no change that Vash could detect. His brother didn't respond to, or even notice, any of his mental hails so Vash took it to mean that no news was good news. Vash figured he could have a little time of his own before he took on the Herculean task of trying to reform his brother.

If he didn't take today, when was he likely to get another chance? Besides, Meryl was a smart woman, perhaps Vash might be able to get some ideas from _her _about how he should proceed. Vash had defeated Knives in a fight, but he still didn't know how he was supposed to get his brother to see things his way; Knives sure as hell wasn't responding to idealism; Meryl was a practical woman, if she came up with a more practical solution or reson for not killing humanity, maybe Knives would listen to _that _where he wouldn't ordinarily give his brother's notions any credit. Knives' main objections to Vash's insistence upon humanities worth was that it was "silly sentimentalism" and "nothing more than the parrotings of that woman's idiot philosophies" if Vash could give him something a little more practical, a little more concrete than no-one having the right to take the life of another, then maybe he'd actually _listen _to Vash for a change!

Nothing else he had tried had worked, and he was beginning to think that this might actually be something he couldn't do on his own. Two heads were better than one after all. Besides the practical reasons (calling in another consultant) he really _wanted _to do this; it had felt like forever since he'd really enjoyed a day. After everything he'd been through, hadn't he earned this?

:_Besides, I kind of want to pay her back_.:

She'd stuck her neck out for him, in more ways than one. First there had been the time that she had literally stood between him and an angry mob, and convinced them to let him go and leave them in peace. Secondly, Milly had said that Meryl, while not actually having falsified a report, had certainly _edited _out a few crucial details. Benardelli trusted her to report all of the full and accurate details to the best of her knowledge of the events, not leaving anything out, no matter how trivial; Milly had said that Meryl had verbally tap-danced her way through the incident at Augusta, even going so far as to claim that she had not been able to be close enough to the site of the blast due to various complications beyond thier control. Milly also said that she knew for a fact that Meryl had not reported any of the things that Vash had told her about himself, his struggle with his brother, and the secrets of the other plants and she was, by company policy, _obligated _to do so. She'd chosen not to. If her seniors ever found out about the ommissions, it would be grounds for her dismissal.

Then there was the matter of putting her work aside; Meryl was a loyal friend. She put up with a lot of things that she probably, strictly speaking did not have to. She'd stuck by him and stood up for him, she'd even gone so far as to take care of him and get a place for him to live, she'd helped him find his purpose again after the world had come crashing down. She'd certainly put up with his foolishness. Even if it was part of her job, she'd followed him to places she'd very clearly rather not be. Vash felt a momentary pang for that; he knew very well that she took her duties seriously and Meryl wasn't the sort to abandon her post at any time day or night... keeping a watch on him was probably a serious infringement on her social life. Following him around all the time meant that they only ever got to do the things he enjoyed, he knew that she hated it when he decided he wanted to go out for a night of drinking. She hid it well, but there was a noticeable lack of enthusiasm, he'd tried once or twice, as they'd gotten to know each other better in thier association to jolly her out of her dislike, get her to loosen up, have a nice beer or something... He'd been stonewalled at every attempt by a very perfectly polite, perfectly correct but somehow suddenly very scary version of Meryl Stryfe. it was like she'd developed the aura of a demon from out of nowhere and it had frozen him from trying to press her further. So, compared to everything she'd been though and done for him, she deserved to do something _she _liked for a change.

:_So nice when I can couch something I would want to do anyways in terms of altruism and self-sacrifice_: he thought a little wryly.

Milly, having suggested the brilliant idea, was somehow reluctant to go along. He'd have smelled a set-up, but the idea was ridiculous. Meryl didn't see him that way; he was a friend at best and an annoyance at worst. Still, it'd be interesting to see what kind of face she wore when she was relaxing and being herself.

"What's all this about?" Meryl asked as she emerged, with Milly (who gave Vash a surreptitious thumbs-up behind her sempai's back) and surveyed the wreck of the living room. There were several coils of light nylon rope of differing thicknesses, metal pitons, flashlights, and other various bits of gear scattered about the living room floor.

"I'm going spelunking," he announced. "If you want to keep me under twenty-four hour surveillance, you're going to have to come with."

She looked surprised and momentarily an expression of delighted happiness briefly flitted across her face before she schooled it into her more usual serious demeanor. Vash caught it and thought that she looked really pretty while she was happy, then just as quickly thought it a shame that she always felt that she needed to be the adult of the group. He'd been an adult for over a hundred years, even if he didn't always prefer to act like it, he knew how to be an adult; there was no need for her to go and do it for him.

"Well I suppose," she said, heaving a contrived, put-upon sigh. "If it's the only way to keep you out of trouble."

"I thought you'd see it my way," he said, trying not to sound triumphant.

Meryl never responded well when she thought someone might be trying to be high-handed with her.

"What about Milly?" she asked next, apparently noticing that there were only two helmets.

"I'm staying here," Milly said. "I want to finish my letter home today, hopefully before the post arrives. I still have middle-big-sister, little-big-sister and little-big-brother to write to, plus two nieces and a cousin."

Vash and Meryl exchanged a long, speaking, non-plussed look between the two of them. Both of them apparently just found it _insane _how large her family was.

"I'll keep an eye on things here for you," Milly promised. "You don't need to worry about a thing Sempai."

A look of suspicion flickered briefly in her eyes, and she narrowed them just a hair at Milly, clearly thinking that there was something going on, then she looked back to where Vash was stowing up the rest of the gear and decided that whatever was going on wasn't worth quibbling over when faced with the rare treat of a favorite hobby of hers. She helped him stow the rest of the gear and Vash was unsurprised to note that there was also a very precise way that she did so, an order and logic that, when looking at it from a viewpoint of needing things on hand was (as usual) very sensible.

The walk out to the outskirts of town and from there out to the nearby canyons was relatively short. Meryl had a ground-eating stride that made up for her lack of relative height when compared to him. The pace for Vash was less than a leisurely stroll but certainly not a power-walk, for Meryl her strides were long (for her legs anyway) but quick, a ground covering pace that she could probably keep up easily all day long.

"You and your dad must have done some hiking," Vash noted as he noticed the way that differences in terrain and the ground before her bothered her not a bit. Her gaze for the stability of the path a head of her was automatic, and her instinct for solid ground versus shaky ground when the reached the real rough patches was infallible. He was almost, but not quite, making the observation a question, or at least an invitation to comment.

:_C'mon, Short Girl_: he prodded mentally. :_I told you all about Rem, give it up already_!:

"Yes," she said, nodding in confirmation. "We did a lot of hiking. It's a habit I've never gotten out of."

It was a good answer, in so far as _her _aims were concerned. It was full, complete and neatly cut off the conversation. Still, Vash wasn't exactly known for his penchant for giving up.

"So what did he do?" he asked next. "Was he a park ranger, or maybe a... um," Vash tried to think of something else he could imagine a guy spawning a woman like Meryl Stryfe having done. Something professional, certainly, the woman's work ethic was iron-clad!

"He... He ah, he was a scientist," Meryl said, an odd note in her voice.

Before Vash could ask what kind (hey! common ground! Rem had been a scientist too!) she continued.

"I guess he was what you might call a dabbler," she added with a very fond smile on her face.

Vash got that smile whenever he talked about Rem, or so he'd been told.

"What did he dabble in?" Vash asked next.

"Oh, a little of this, a little of that," she said. "He worked at a geo-plant for a few months when I was five, I remember very clearly being allowed to tour the facilities with him. He was very interested in geology, in fact I vaguely recall that there was a reason we moved around so much. He was researching something."

Meryls face pinched and furrowed as she tried to remember.

"It's strange... my memory about what he was looking for is sort of... fuzzy. I don't know if it's just the usual childhood disinterest in the details of a parents work or what but its seems a little odd."

"How so?" Vasj asked curiously.

"I can remember other details of my life at that time with perfect crystal clarity, like they happened yesterday. I can remember where we lived and where we traveled to and a lot of the people we met, but when I try to recall certain other details that it feels like I should know its like there's some kind of thick impenetrable fog around it, it's just a blank blur. Nothing there."

Vash had experienced something similar in his own lifetime; the events surrounding the destruction of July had been as much a mystery to him for many years as it had to anyone else. It hadn't been until after he'd regained his memories that Vash understood everything... and his mission.

"Papa wasn't interested in being the pet scientist for big business though," Meryl said, an obvious note of pride in her voice. "This was before the Malipais Expedition, and his area of research took a drastic change after that."

"Expedition?" Vash asked, curiously.

"Yeah, him and a bunch of other scientists all got together and went to excavate the ruins of some old derelict ship that someone found in the desert. There were rumors about it being the lead ship, but I guess that wasn't true."

Meryl shrugged a little.

"I dunno, I was a child at the time and didn't know a whole lot about what my father did for a living, except when it moved us around."

"Did you go on the expedition with him?" Vash asked next.

Somehow he was getting the image in his mind of a Victoran child, dressed in proper dresses accompanying her scientist father out on his feild researches in the Congo or whatever, or on archaeological digs in Egypt.

"Yes, some of them," Meryl replied with a smile. "I was mostly told to stay in the camp though, especially when I was younger. When I got older I helped him put together his notes and type out the reports, but I don't actually remember most of what was in them. I remember that he was very excited about the properties of some new kind of crystal he'd found though. Keep in mind, I was still a child so the samples he'd brought back to camp only interested me because they were bright and sparkly."

Meryl suddenly stopped and turned toward him, fumbling with the scoop neck of her top. Vash was about to protest that doing that out in the open wasn't something he was interested in when she made a triumphant noise and pulled something out from the front of her shirt with a flourish.

Vash knew that she always wore earrings, but with that high-collared thing and the office blouse she wore beneath it, he had never been able to tell if she wore a necklace to match. Mystery solved. Dangling from a golden chain was a small six-sided, teardrop-shaped pendant made of some kind of strange crystal. Colors seemed to swirl about in it like soft, roiling misty-hued clouds. It was slightly translucent iridescent white in the light and almost seemed to glow a little, but Vash was sure that was his eyes playing tricks on him, until his got closer to it and his real arm twitched in recognition of a strange power signature.

Vash had always been sensitive to energy, he could sense the life energy of organisims, he could sense the plasma-based energy of storms and electricity, and of course being a plant, he could sense his brethren too. He'd never sensed anything _remotely _like what he felt in that stone. He'd truly never seen a stone quite like it before, it looked close to opal, but it had a sort of liquid quality to it. Very faintly a soft misty light seemed to emanate from within it.

"That's pretty," he said still staring at it in fascination. "What is it?"

"He called it energist," she said quietly. "My father gave it to me as a present, and told me to keep it with me always. It was the last present I ever got from him. I've carried it with me ever since, I guess it's a good luck charm."

Vash wasn't only interested in the stone because it was pretty, there was something _odd _about it as well, something he couldn't quite put his finger on.

"There's something strange about it," he said reaching for it so he could look at it more closely. He jerked his hand back when he touched it and it glowed.

"It can absorb and store energy," Meryl warned him, putting it away in her cleavage... er, shirt. "I don't think he ever figured out how it worked. This was back before I'd learned much of anything about molecules or the elements, but papa was excited because this crystal that he'd found supposedly was a compound of silicon and some new element that wasn't on the table."

Vash's eyebrows raised at that. A new element? That would put him in the history books for certain!

"That's the discovery of a lifetime," Vash said seriously. "How come--?"

Meryl shook her head, indicating that she didn't know either.

"I don't know why he never reported it," she said, almost as if she'd read his mind. "Certainly it would have been all over the news and the sat-feeds if he had; scientific discoveries like that don't just happen every day."

Meryl looked like she wanted to add on to that, but seemed to check herself and said nothing. Vash suppressed a surge of disappointment. And things had been going so well; Meryl certainly wasn't the type who opened up easily, a real tough nut to crack.

"Here we are," Vash said, indicating a canyon side face just slightly to the right of them. Milly had said that the well diggers had discovered this egress from the caves carved out by the water of the underground aquifer they were digging in. Since the caves dropped down into a vertical drop, like a natural well, several feet inside the mouth of the opening, no-one had been down to explore it yet. He and Meryl would be the first.

* * *

**Ask and you shall receive. I want to thank all of those who have read and reveiwed this story so far, your reviews keep me posting. Oh, hey... has anyone else heard about the new Trigun Movie they're making? Yeah, it's true, when my friend in the anime club sent me a link to the article about it, I nearly died of happiness on the spot! Kya kya kyaaaaaa!**


	9. Building a Mystery

Meryl poked her head curiously into the slim cleft that opened up in the cave wall; it was a tight squeeze at first, but it widened out later. A draft of cold air, smelling of dank and earth, drifted out from the opening. She turned on her head lamp and the one she carried in her hand and strode fearlessly into the cleft. Vash followed more cautiously behind. The floor, aside of being rough and uneven was also far from level. A steady slope, sometimes dropping drastically downhill, proceeded from the mouth of the fissure.

"Keep a careful watch on the floor, the drop off is sudden and you don't want to fall in," he warned her. Meryl made and a noise of agreement. The sound of their footsteps on the stone and their breaths was the only sound that penetrated the cathedral-like silence of the cave. Their footsteps made a soft, strange echoing sound off the stone and faintly somewhere was the sound of dripping water.

"Hold up," Meryl said, putting a hand back to signal for him not to move. Meryl cautiously edged further along on the path, shining her light at different angles to make the shadows move.

"It's just a trick of the shadows," she announced a moment later. She continued on, Vash following in her wake. A few moments after that, she called for another halt.

"Here we are," she announced, with a distinct note of anticipation in her voice.

She cracked a small bundle of glow sticks and tossed them over the abrupt edge of the giant hole in the gound that spead out like a gaping lake of darkness before them. Meryl counted seconds under her breath as the green-glowing light faded down, down, down, then hit against some protrusion, hit against another protrusion (if its suddenly erratic path was anything to jusge by, and apbruptly disappeared.

"Hm. Seems promising," Meryl remarked. "I'll bet there's more than one cavern."

While she busied herself checking the security of the rock face they proposed to anchor themselves to Vash decided to broach the matter that he'd really put off thinking about for the past little while.

"About Knives..." he started, uncertain what he should say exactly.

"What about him?" she asked glancing over at him from the corner of her eye as she double checked the ropes.

"I might have won the fight, but I don't know if he's going to change his mind or not," Vash said honestly.

"If the two of you have another gunfight, do it away from the town, I don't want to have to spend the next week filling out damage reports on the collateral damages you two cause," was Meryl's practical reply.

"I'm hoping it won't come to that," Vash said plaintively. "But I just don't know what to say to him that'll make him change his mind."

"Tell him that if he doesn't do what you want, you'll cut his arm off and paste it on one of _your _people," Meryl said with a lopsided grin.

Vash gave her a _look_. That was the kind of solution that Wolfwood would have suggested.

"But in all seriousness," Meryl said, sobering an instant later. "If you want to pursue a course of action that doesn't leave both parties half-blind and toothless, you might be well advised to put a few securities on him. You know... insurance."

Vash studied her quietly for a moment or two, thinking over what she said.

"Won't that imply that I don't trust him?" Vash said finally.

"Are you telling me that you _do_?" Meryl asked archly, raising an eyebrow at him.

"Well no, but--" he thought a moment. "As brothers, if we're going to fight we should do so on an equal battleground."

Merlys laughter rang out in the chamber for a good long minute. She wiped away a tear of mirth once she had gotten her amusement under control and turned to look at him. She sighed a little and shook her head.

"You mean like the way he ambushed you and forced you to resonate with him to open your arm with enough power to wipe out a city, or the way he studied all of your weaknesses for years and created a team of assassins which he sent out to wear you down with battle after battle? Or maybe you were talking about how he--"

"Okay _okay_!" Vash said, cutting her off.

"Vash. Siblings _never _fight fair," she stated with the unequivocal conviction of mathematical law.

"Believe me. If I thought my brother was doing something wrong that I didn't agree with, you'd better believe that I'd do everything in my power to stop him; blackmail, bribery, out and out ass-whuppin'. Whatever it took. Knives might even be as stubborn as I am... maybe."

She set about pulling pitons out of her pack, followed by a coiled length of rope and her harness.

"So you don't think he's just going to give up and see it my way then?"

"Would you?" Meryl replied. "I mean, if your positions were reversed would you have given up on your ideals if he'd won the battle?"

"Of course not!" Vash replied.

"Well there you have it then. He's your twin, I'll bet he's just as stubborn as you are."

"So what am I supposed to do then?" he wondered aloud.

"My advice would be to plan one step ahead of him," she said, locking a piton into place. "But since you don't know what he's going to do, you're already at a disadvantage and the fight hasn't even started yet."

"I love how you always look at the bright side," Vash muttered.

He was beginning to wonder if, since Wolfwood was no longer around to tell him these things, Meryl had taken it upon herself to be the voice that stripped things down to thier simplest form, without all of the high-minded ideals, and laid out the situations and choices he faced in thier barest form.

You're a pessimist," he announced to the air at large.

"I'm a realist," was her reply.

"Okay," he said, deciding to work with her on that. "So, taking the facts as we know them or can assume them. Suppose he decides not to cooperate?"

"You could kick his ass again," Meryl suggested. "You could try to reason with him--"

"I note that you put the ass-kicking before the reasoning," Vash said sardonically.

"You've already tried reasoning with him and it doesn't seem to have worked terribly well," Meryl replied. "You could find some form of incarceration. He'd be out of the way and you won't have killed him, but I doubt you'd be up for that."

"Why do you say that?" Vash asked next.

She was right, Vash hadn't wanted to think about finding some way to seal Knives up but the fact that it was apparent enough that she'd picked up on it seemed significant for some reason.

"He's your brother," Meryl replied. "And your twin. You may not like or agree with him all the time but you don't want to think of putting him away either, its hard to do that to someone you love because you want to think that somewhere deep down there's a part of them that _wants _to be redeemed. That may or may not be the case, but you still want to believe in them, no matter thier offences."

She'd hit it on he head. Vash had brought his brother back there in hopes of finding that tiny scrap of the boys they had been, that brother that had loved humanity and had looked forward to meeting the sleepers with anticipation. He wanted to bring back the kind, loving brother that he'd had before Knives had been twisted by hatred.

Meryl was silent for a long moment, not moving. Then, her voice quiet and serious, she said

"It's strange, but somehow... I don't think you're entirely _wrong_. Not completely anyway. It easy to give up on people, the hard path is staying by them and loving them, even when you don't agree with them. It seems to me that well... Okay I'm probably way off base here, so stop me if you think I'm reading too much into things that I don't know much about, but it seems to me that _he's all twisted up inside_."

Vash nodded for her to continue, this was a surprisingly sympathetic veiwpoint from a woman who wasn't known for having a very sympathetic nature. Meryl wasn't the guru about knowing the hearts and minds of people that Milly was, but she could on occassion be surprisingly sharp about some things.

:_That's odd_: part of his mind noted.

At that last part it had sounded vaguely like Meryl wasn't entirely _herself_. Strange as it sounded, Vash could sense a strange sort of _echo _behind her voice, like there were many other voices speaking along with her. It was probably the weird accoustics of the cave.

"Fear can lead to anger, which then turns to rage and hatred and bitterness," she continued, her voice still strangely resonant. "When you build walls inside yourself to keep others, even your own kin, outside from reaching you, you don't let anything in, no warmth or laughter or light. So he's sitting there all alone in the dark, twisting his anger and hatred back in on itself and feeding from it so it grows ever greater."

The strange acoustics of the cave cut off, and suddenly he heard only Meryl's voice say plainly

"He's like a guilty child. He's a like a little boy acting out out of anger or hurt, who's done wrong, and who _knows _he's done wrong and he feels guilty about it. But he also feels that because he's "smarter" or "superior" that he always has to be right... so he goes and acts even _worse _just to prove that he is right."

:_Out of the mouths of fools and babes_,: as Wolfwood would say.

So far as Vash could tell, she'd called it exactly, and hearing it in that tart, brisk, no-nonsense voice of hers made the profound revelation incongruiously funny. Vash couldn't help smiling. If he thought he could get away with it, he'd have hugged her again.

"Hm. Damn," Meryl muttered looking down at her chest again in distraction. "It's slipped out again."

During their walk through the caverns, Vash had noted that Meryls necklace had been playing hide and seek in the neck of her shirt. The chain was at such a length that it was just at the rim, barely covered by the neck, and each time she moved any certain way it popped out again, and Meryl habitually stuffed it out of sight.

"Rock climbing's tough work, and i don't want anything to happen to it," she muttered fussily.

She clearly treasured the little trinket, and it was unusual. She turned to him, slightly pleading look on her face.

"Vash," she said. "My the chain's too short and my shirt doesn't protect it like usual, I don't want it falling off or getting lost down there. Would you mind holding on to it for a little while?"

"Oh, sure," he said. "I don't mind, I promise I'll take good care of it."

She looked a little hesitant, despite the fact that she'd asked in the first place, as she reached back and carefully undid the clasp at the nape of her neck. She very reluctantly pulled it away from her.

"I don't even take it off when I shower," she admitted. "Or even when I sleep. It's strange, being without it makes me feel naked."

Vash very much did not comment on her being "naked" in his company, because if he'd have said what he wanted to say to that statement he'd have been nursing a goosegg on his head for a week.

"It's in good hands," he reassured her, as he clasped it around his own neck and stored it safely under the collar of his shirt. Vash didn't comment on the fact that the moment it touched his skin, he'd felt a strange subtle humming vibration from it.

"Well, let's get going," Meryl said, having concluded that their discussion was over with. "We want to be back at the house before dark."

She locked in the pitons and secured the guide rope then went over every single buckle and line before clicking herself in. Vash was about to protest her going down first (after all, who knew what was down there) when there was a sudden drop in the amount of light and Meryl popped over the edge and dropped. Vash watched anxiously as the light from Meryls lamp slid further away from sight by leaps. Moments later he heard her voice echo softly back up to him.

"I've found a ledge, come on down."

Vash hooked himself onto the line and rappelled down the rough cliff face of the hole in the cavern. Going down was fun, it was getting up again that was the difficult part. The ledge that Meryl had found for them was good sized, jutting out five feet from the nearly ninty-degree surface of the wall face and three feet across until it tapered back into the cavern wall.

"Looks like a good place to set up a second set," Meryl commented even as she shot another set of pitons into the sturdy rock face and attached another length of line onto them.

Vash's attention however was taken up by a strange hollow in the heretofore completely smooth face of the cliff. It was as if the ledge they had landed on was the landing or balcony of something that went further back into that cliff wall. There was a nearly _perfect _arch, worn abnormally smooth, in the stone. It looked too smooth to be a natural formation, in fact it looked like someone had deliberately carved it there! Vash put a hand to the side of the arch and noted that the stone was native stone, but there was an odd sort of roughness to it, like someone had deliberately carved little lines into it. He shone his handlamp at it to have a closer look.

Those were _definitely _carvings.

The carving was only two spots though, one on either side of the arch within easy touching distance of a persons hand, in a spot roughly circumfrencing three feet. Curious, Vash shone his handlamp to the back of the arch, where the cliff face should be, and found, to his disapointment, nothing more exciting than an ordinary flat wall of stone. Wait... the wall was too flat. It wasn't a natuaral formation either!

"Interesting," Meryl said, joining him a moment later and looking at the carvings in the stone on the undersides of the arch that made a little niche in the stone of the cliff wall.

The carvings were of circles and lines all interwoven in a strange spiraling knot-work-like pattern. Vash couldn't make any sense of the symbols that spiraled and curved in on themselves in a pattern that looked almost spiderweb-like at times excepting for the spiral-circles that were at every node of the pattern. Inside those spiral circles were tiny ordinary circles at regular intervals.

"It looks..." Meryl trailed off, her brow furrowed in perplexity, she looked for all the world like someone who was trying desperately to remember something that had escaped them, like a word that was on the tip of a tongue.

"Do you recognize this?" Vash asked, surprised. He'd never come across anything like it.

"It seems familiar," Meryl admitted, sounding puzzled. "It feels like there should be a..."

Meryl advanced towards the flat stone surface and Vash, a native sense of caution rising up in him reached out to stop her advance but she was already past his fingertips.

"Wait," he cautioned but too late. Meryl had already touched the stone surface.

There was a strange humming noise in the air and Vash felt an odd sort of vibration rub at his skin and bones. Vash looked over in surprise as the formerly blank surface of the flat rock face at the back inside the niche made by the arch began to have brightly glowing sigils in a bluish white light. They weren't symbols from any language Vash recognized; not runes, not hieroglyphs, not cuniform, not chinese characters, nothing he'd ever encountered looked remotely like them... except perhaps for some mathematical notations and even those didn't look nearly right. Meryl touched a symbol from the wall face and then, like someone sleeping in a dream or hypnotized, walked over to the side of the arch and touched one of the nodes in the pattern. The circle flashed, and a line of light flowed out along the pattern to the next circle. Meryl walked back to the cliff face and touched another symbol then touched the next circle in the pattern. Vash thought about stopping her, but somehow the thought never translated itself into action. A strange creeping lethargy had taken hold of him, not enough to make him want to sleep, but enough to make him so relaxed that the thought of moving was almost incomprehensible. A little voice whispered to his lizard brain, the instinctive part of him, that somehow he was perfectly safe here and that whatever was happening now that would have formerly caused him alarm, was perfectly alright and natural.

Meryl went back and forth several more times, touching runes and circles until the spirlaling-spiderweb patterns on either side of the arch had been filled in and were glowing quietly. Then she seemed to wake up to herself, like one who had slipped off into a daydream or nodded off into a nap, Meryl started and shook her head. The strange lethargy left Vash even more quickly than it had come on.

"Are you alright?" Vash asked concernedly.

He would have reached out to touch her and make certain she was okay but Meryl startled into backing away quickly, like a tomas shying at a sudden movement.

"I'm fine," she said, a little thickly. "It''s just... my head feels like its stuffed with wool. I feel like I'm remembering something, something important. Something I've forgotten that shouldn't be forgotten."

She was talking nonsense. Meryl... _Meryl _was talking nonsense. The most practical, decidedly straightforward woman he'd ever met was babbling nonsense.

"Oookay, I think that's enough for now," Vash said shooing her quickly towards the rope. "I think you need a nap or a doctor or--"

Vash was interrupted by the scrape and grind of stone rumbling on top of stone. The wall at the back of the niche had a perfectly smooth crack in it in the shape of a perfect circle that was sliding back from the surface of the rock face and then it rolled to the side like a wheel, revealing a tunnel. Whatever he'd been about to say to her was lost as Meryl strode fearlessly forward into the depths of a place that had been hidden for reasons unknown. Vash found himself, in the oddest reversal of roles ever, trying to be the voice of caution.

"Wait Meryl! Don't go in there, you don't know what--" he gave up and rushed after her, shining his handlamp into the all consuming darkness beyond.

Except that it wasn't dark. The cave was lit from the rear by some glow whose source he couldn't detirmine just yet.

:This isn't a natural cave.: He wasn't certain where the conviction came from but he was as certain of it as he ever had been of anything. The floor was too smooth, too level. There were no crystals, or stalactites and stalagmites, no rock formations at all, in fact it looked like someone had taken a core sample from the rock and left behind a perfectly tube-shaped hole eight feet tall at it's highest point. Vash didn't like it for some reason. It was too perfect.

"Meryl, I think we should turn back," he said firmly, but she wasn't listening to him. She was already walking ahead, like someone being led either by their own curiosity or had someone else calling them on. She leaned forward a bit in anticipation almost as if she expected to see or hear something at any moment.

Sure enough, they came to the end of the tunnel, and it too was blocked up by a perfectly flat, perfectly smooth section of rock wall that had another approximately hexagonal-shaped spiderweb-spiraling-knotwork pattern carved in it, this one simply surrounded by more of those symbols on the outside of it.

Vash reached out to catch her arm, fully prepared to drag her to the surface of the world over his shoulder if that was what it took. The feeling of unease he'd been feeling in the pit of his stomach grew steadily. She shook him off with a strength at odds with her tiny frame and in the moment it took for him to recover from the unexpected shove, he turned his back for just an instant and she touched the diagram... and disappeared.

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**Dun dun duuun! The plot thickens, and now we're getting somewhere. Sort of. The next chapter will read a little disjointedly but try to bear with it, the chapter or two after it has the action in it and then the story really gets moving. Please let me know what you think!**


	10. Whisper In the Dark

"Meryl!" he yelled, on the verge of panic.

He slammed himself against the wall, searching for a crack or crevice or door... _something _that he could use to break through to where she was. The wall before him remained blank, unmovable stone. The diagram was still there, but the glowing sigils were gone. Vash pounded his fist against the unyeilding stone, and though the blows were enough to leave sizable dents in it, the rock remained unmoved.

Vash, because of what he was, had an ace in the hole. He had an angel arm. No matter how sturdy the stone wall was it would be no match for something that could wipe out a city. Now if only he could be certain that Meryl wasn't just on the other side of that wall and would get disintegrated if he blew it up. Well, maybe he didn't have to go _full _angel arm, those feathers he and Knives had could cut through anything, no reason why he couldn't just summon them up and slice through the stone easy-peasy. He took a deep breath and cleared his mind, it took a lot of concentration for him to summon up an angel arm on his own (because he didn't do it very often).

A moment later, that strange creeping lethargy rose and seeped over him clouding his mind and telling him that he should relax, that everything was okay that he should just go to sleep for a little while and no matter how the panicking inner voice screamed at him that sleeping was the _last _thing he should be doing while Meryl was disappeared, possibly hurt or in trouble, his eyes shut and he fell into a deep dreamless sleep.

& & &

"Vash? Vash!" Meryl called out, nervous, bordering on being really frightened to find herself suddenly all alone in a cave by herself with only a vague, fuzzy recollection of how she'd gotten there. It felt like she had just woken up from a drugged sleep, with dreams that had been so vivid only a moment before now suddenly melting away like mist before the suns.

She looked around her, there was a blank wall at her back and another long winding tunnel ahead of her and she wasn't certain really how she'd gotten there or why she was alone now. Meryl felt a bubble of pure fear and alarm at finding herself alone int he dark, without her companion and not knowing where she was. For a moment her breathing and heart rate quickened in panic. She throttled it down quickly. Giving into panic had never served anyone, and would be detrimental, what she needed to do right then was take stock, investigate options and figure out the exact situation that she was in, then act accordingly. Meryl made her breathing slow and grasped firmly a hold of herself and forced herself back under her control.

First of all, her companion was missing.

"Vash!" she called out listening carefully.

"Vaaaash!" she tried again and then listened for a few more moments.

No reply. So, he was either out of hearing range, unconscious or unable to respond. Meryl got a terrible image of her friend trapped in a rockslide somewhere, or hurt, or with a head injury slowly losing blood... Meryl shook her head violently, that was not helping the situation! She moved onto the next.

Second, she had a dead-end to her back. The tunnel before her was, by the light of her hand-lamp unnaturally smooth and symmetrical. This wasn't a natural phenomenon, this place she'd discovered had been _made_, who had made it and why was a mystery. It was also irrelevant at the moment, but something told Meryl that it wasn't the well workers of the town. The sides and ceiling to the tunnel were too perfect for the crude tools that they used. Meryl, on the odd chance that she might have missed something, felt all along the wall to her back and the edges of the tunnel, but neither saw nor felt anything, not even any of those carvings that had been on the first entrance to what was obviously a man made tunnel. So, no turning back then.

:_Really, I only have one direction I can go_: she thought practically.

She didn't know what was ahead of her but she could prepare as best she could.

She took mental inventory of the things in her pack, she had extra pitons, D-rings and rope so she was covered in case of another drop. Also a grapling hook. Extra clothes, boots, a blanket, a small warming unit, extra batteries for her hand lamp, glowing chalks to mark her way and most importantly emergency food and water. So she was probably good for a little while anyway.

Meryl ignored the panic clenching at her gut, gritted her teeth and clamped down on the urge to cry at finding herself lost and alone in a dark strange place, and told herself sternly that she wasn't going to solve anything by just standing here. In order to survive she was going to have to think like a survivor; the human body burned calories just by continuing to live, like a toy top spinning in place, if there wasn't a way to renew those calories then her body would eventually eat _itself _and she would die. It was essentially a race against time and the clock was ticking. So... moving, no matter that she didn't know where she was moving to, was better than standing still. Standing still meant giving up.

:_Come on feet_:, she said to herself.

Meryl marked the wall behind her with one of the glowing chalks in a spelukers symbol for "going on from this point" and wrote another symbol in spelunker shorthand that meant "continued in this direction." If anyone should manage to come after her, namely Vash, it might be that he'd come across her marks.

She firmly started out down the long tunnel before her her solitary footsteps creating a strange echo down the halls. She could only hope that she'd manage to find Vash. Her watch said she'd been walking for only a few minutes but it already felt like hours when she was alone in the dark. The tunnel curved gently, the slope leading steadily downward, the floor and walls as smooth as polished stone. Meryl staved off panic by counting her steps and marking the wall of the cavern, a little uselessly as there were no off-tunnels or openings whatsoever.

She traveled what she judged to be about two-hundred fifty feet downward when there came a glimmer of light in the tunnel ahead. Certain that her eyes and mind were playing tricks on her already, Meryl turned off her hand-lamp and let her eyes swim in the darkness. The light remained. Meryl let herself feel cautiously optimistic, perhaps it was an egress point.

:_But the tunnel has been moving down, not up_,: she told herself, trying not to get too hopeful. Still, it could be the opening to a very large cavern, one that opened up to the sky; if that were true she had enough rope and a grapling hook, she'd be able to climb out and fetch a party to rescue Vash!

:_I hope he's okay_,: she thought anxiously. The light ahead didn't look quite right for daylight, it was a cold blue-white rather than a warm yellow-gold. Still, it was all she had and it was better than nothing.

At last, she rounded the bend of the tunnel and saw what lay beyond. The tunnel opened out into a cavern with a vast lake, an underground spring. The water itself was lit from underneath by a soft blue-white light, Meryl could only assume that it was some kind of phosphorescent fungus growing on the rocks. the high ceiling of the cavern was painted in ever-moving rippling wavelets from the water reflecting patterns of light upwards. Jutting up from the center was a small island with a huge crystal growing on it that was also glowing, and glowing very brightly. A bluish, purplish ultraviolet white light that nearly blinded her (her eyes having grown accustomed to the light of her hand-lamp) radiated from the heart of the crystal spire jutting up out of the lake. That wasn't the strangest thing of all.

Meryl could swear that she could hear it _singing_.

:_Such a lovely song_,: she thought.

Vvaguely there was a strange sleepy, soporific buzz about her senses that made her feel so relaxed, like a child sleeping in the embrace of their mother. The song itself, was so _familiar_ and yet she could swear she'd never actually heard it before. Meryl tried to let her brow furrow in the puzzlement over that; she knew deep down that it should somehow _bother _her, but it didn't. She didn't feel anything at all in fact, all that worry and fear about being caught alone in the dark was gone and in its place was a warm sleepy contentment, like a cat napping in the sun and a certainty that all was right with the world.

That strange familiar song that was not a song grew in intensity and her mind and body felt slow and sleepy, as if she were drugged, her head buzzed with it and it hummed inside of her. She forgot to feel alarmed at the strangeness of it all, she just knew deep down that this was no enemy to her, she was perfectly safe there, she could relax and come a little closer.

Meryl wasn't even aware that she had slipped into the waters of the lake until she was waist deep in them and even then it was with a vague realization of "oh, my shoes are wet, I should take them off." The water was warm, warm as the waters of the womb. And then her consciousness slipped away and she was enveloped by the song, cradled, and sleeping in light.

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**Review please?**


	11. Complete

Vash woke up suddenly with a start and was flooded with panic. Where was Meryl?! He jerked his head from side to side, searching...

And he wasn't even in the same place! He'd fallen unconscious in the tunnel that led away from the wall-door hidden in the ledge they'd landed on and he was now in a tiny natural cavelet that he'd never seen before. Golden yellow sunlight poured in through an opening in the wall; it led outside! His general unease and nervousness about suddenly fining himself in unexpected places when he couldn't remember how he'd gotten there dispersed in a wave of relief at knowing that there was a way out! Now he could bring back a rescue party to find Meryl!

A notion that was unnecessary, he discovered a moment later, when he found a huddled form near the way out. Another wave of relief crashed over him as he kneeled next to the sleeping form of Meryl Stryfe, breathing alive and apparently unharmed... though, oddly, she appeared to be soaked to the skin.

:_We're getting out of here, right now, before anything else weird happens to us_!: he decided an instant later. He shook her by the shoulder, surprised and puzzled to find that she was completely drenched. Meryl awoke with a small hiss of pain and Vash immediately feared that she'd gotten into an accident.

"Are you okay?" he asked in his next breath, patting her down quickly in a cursory examination for injuries.

Her eyes opened a crack, and Vash could have sworn that for just an instant as she opened them, they weren't their usual dove-grey color, but were instead a strange liquid-quicksilver. Before he could he certain, Meryl blinked, then opened her eyes fully and they were the same they had always been. He decided that it must have been a trick of the light. She stared blankly at him for a long moment, as if she wasn't entirely certain of where they were, or even who he was!

"How many fingers am I holding up?" he demanded next, certain that she had some kind of head injury.

"Two," she said with groggy impatience. "And I didn't hit my head, I'm fine."

"You'd say that if you were dying," he immediately dismissed. "What day is it?"

"The day I lodge my boot where the suns don't shine if you don't leave off," Meryl growled, glaring irritatedly at him.

:_Well, I guess she's okay then_: Vash thought of her abrupt return to normalacy.

She yawned tiredly and looked around her.

"How did we get here?" she wondered aloud. "And where's here?"

"Good questions, I was hoping you'd know," he said, offering a hand to help her to her feet, but she was already getting up on her own. "Last thing I knew I was freaking out because you'd rushed off and disappeared."

He shot her a Look for making him worry like that, the look bounced right on past her without a pause to rest as she seemed more interested in the exit to the caves. She was looking out of it from a position on her knees, having not gotten the strength right then to rise completely.

"Hey!" she called cheerfully over at him. "I know where we are!"

Vash looking over at her could instinctively tell that the cheer in her voice was forced, the mask of unflappable calm on her face didn't manage to conceal entirely the lingering fear in her eyes. The events that had just passed were as unnerving to her as they had been to him. Meryl made to rise fully to her feet, but Vash stopped her gently with a hand on her arm. He peered intently into her face.

"Are you alright? Really?" he asked her, his tone an manner serious.

"I-" she looked like she was trying to reassure him, and also like she was trying to lie. Meryl was as straightforward and honest as they came, and as such she was a terrible liar.

"It's alright," he said resignedly.

He knew darned well that she wasn't about to admit weakness, perhaps especially not to him.

"You don't have to say anything. I understand."

"Vash," she said softly into the room, her voice just barely above a whisper. She was shaking a little, and suddenly he thought she might be cold, she was soaked to the skin after all (mysteriously so) and the chill damp air of the cave would probably make her catch a chill. Milly would never forgive him if he let that happen to her, and an upset Milly was not to be thought of.

"Here, let's get you out of here," he said coaxingly.

He should get them back to a place where there were other people around, because if they stayed here while she was looking so vulnerably at him Vash was afraid he'd wind up doing or saying something to her that he was afraid he wouldn't bring himself to regret, and he had no _right _to think these things. He didn't have the _right _to think that he wanted to wrap her up tight in his arms and keep her all to himself, he didn't have the _right _to want to make promises to her that included words like forever... and for a being like him, promises like that could be literal. There was so much else he needed to worry about right then, and as much as he told himself that he couldn't afford the distraction at that time, he _was _distracted; he was distracted by the beauty of her. The detirmination in her stubborn little chin, the pixie-like face with the wide pewter-grey eyes, by the slight, delicate, sylph-like form of her body that held a will of tempered steel. Though slight, she had curves that just seemed to invite caresses; trim waist, shapely hips, slim shoulders and he wanted so much... he just wanted to hold her, just for a little while. Surely that would be okay.

He recognized that tiny voice inside himself trying to make deals, to allow him to do what he wanted against doing what he knew was best. If he allowed himself to listen to that voice telling himself that it was okay to cheat, just a little, that it was okay to have what he wanted for a moment or two, it wouldn't be long before he started getting greedy, and went from longing after things he knew he couldn't have to trying to get them for himself.

He couldn't have her, but he _wanted _her, and if they stayed like this for much longer he might just damn the consequences.

Vash very carefully pulled back away from her, putting an arms length distance between the two of them. That was as it should be, he couldn't have her, so it was best to keep his distance. He'd have to go back to calling her insurance girl and short girl, rather than Meryl... he wondered when he'd gotten so used to getting to call her by her name, it was an intimacy he'd rarely indulged in until recently. He was getting spoiled.

"Wait," she murmured, looking up at him with that stragely naked gaze.

Vulnerable and Meryl were usually two words that didn't belong in the same book together, let alone the same sentence, but there was no mistaking a certain amount of vulnerability to her that he didn't usually see. Had something happened to her down there? There was so much about the events of the day that Vash couldn't fully explain and that made him very nervous. He was the one who was accustomed to knowing things that other people weren't remotely aware of, from the true events of the Great Fall to the secret of the plant bulbs that the average layman took to be no more than supermarket rags. It unnerved him that he couldn't explain much of what had happened that day, and the fact that Meryl was scared and vulnerable and he couldn't offer her any real answers at all was making it worse.

That vulnerability pulled at him, rousing every protective instinct he had, and some others he hadn't been aware existed. Everything inside of him mandated that he was supposed to give her comfort, shelter her. Surely that was okay, right?

And he still wanted--

His thoughts cut off at the feel of a sudden weight against his chest. He looked down to see that she was leaning against him, her arms around his waist. She was shivering, Vash didn't know if it was from cold or from something else, all he was really aware of was a soft shiver and then, a strange feeling of... completeness. He felt strangely warm and relaxed suddenly, all the minor discomforts that were such a daily part of his life that he hardly even noticed they were there anymore; the continual ache of the grate in his chest bonded into his flesh, the resistant stretch and pull of his scar tissue, the various small aches where bones and other peices had never been allowed to heal quite right... they all disappeared, every last one of them. In place of the minor pains was a warm lassitude, a feeling of well-being humming throughout his entire body. He felt wonderful! There was such a feeling of wholeness, of well being, like he'd somehow been missing a vital part of himself he hadn't noticed was gone until it had suddenly been restored to him.

A wild, indeterminate part of him that he'd never understood and had just shoved back into the back of a closet in his mind (that occasionally emerged in the form of the Diablo) suddenly reoriented itself, latched onto a sense of purpose and _pushed_. He felt the pure power and sense of "otherness" that Vash generally tried to ignore, well up inside of himself. Instead of a painful hiss and sting of that power forcing its way out, Vash instead felt a gentle hum and flow, dance and sway perfectly controlled, but almost of its own volition, rushing towards a goal he understood only instinctively. There was a sense of expectation, of anticipation, like if he could just find this thing he was looking for, then everything in the world would fall into place.

It felt warm and soft, like a golden glow permeating his entire being. It was still and the only thing between him and Meryl, it felt, was their breaths. There was such a wonderful feeling of tranquility, of peace, as though for all the time he'd spent searching in the wide, harsh world, he'd at last found the place where he could rest. The still calm center in the middle of a turbulent universe.

Vash hadn't been aware that he'd closed his eyes and wrapped his arms around her until she suddenly squirmed violently in his arms. As if someone had cut it off with a knife, the wonderful feeling of happiness that bordered on a pure, divine, unalloyed _joy _just stopped. Vash felt simultaneously like someone had rudely splashed cold water on him and the bottom of the world had dropped out from under him; he came suddenly, instantly and unpleasantly awake.

Muffled by cave walls, there was still the strange trembling feeling of something happening nearby and Vash could sense it. He could also sense something else.

His brother's presence, which had been like a soft back-ground hum in his thoughts, constant but thankfully unchanging, had suddenly between one instant in the next went from a hum to a buzz, to a dull roar. He was awake, and interested in making his displeasure known. It was time to go.

Meryl looked at him in puzzlement when he reluctantly released her and set her at arms length, though he was unable still to bring himself to let go of her completely.

Vash looked out of the entrance of the cave noted with relief that the cave was located almost directly at one of the well sites where Milly worked, down a small ridge of skree just off the mesa outside of town about a twenty minute walk from where they lived. His relief was short lived however, for no sooner did one problem resolve itself than a bigger one took its place. Story of his life.

Rising up in the air like great black pillars were billowing columns of smoke. The town was on fire. Vash could see easily that people were running around in a panic shouting while something made a mess at one end of the town. Vash was too well acquainted with a situation like this not to recognize what it was. Someone or something was attacking.

Meryl and Vash exchanged a look filled with dread and knowing.

"Knives," they said in unison.

* * *

**Ah, and so it begins. Damn Knives, ruining poor Vash's mood! He had a nice little atmosphere going on... no kiss though, that's a little disappointing.**


	12. Scarlet Rage

:_Vash, you idiot_!: he thought at himself in recrimination.

Of _course _he should never have left his brother alone. Knives... He was just too dangerous.

:_Dammit_!:

He turns his back for one second and-- There'd be plenty of time for self-flagellation later.

"Stay here," Vash commanded, even as Meryl grabbed her nearby pack.

"Like hell," Meryl replied in the same tone.

Meryl fished out a six-shooter gun and box of bullets from her pack and tossed it over her shoulder at him. It was her emergency back-up for those occasions when she couldn't wear her cloak but didn't want to go unarmed. Vash thought it would have made more sense to go the other way around, but then again, a larger gun was harder to conceal on her person.

"I mean it," Vash said.

Meryl, true to character didn't even look back as she shouldered her pack and hopped off the side of the ledge they were on, sliding with a cloud of dust down the skree slope. Vash cursed inwardly and jumped out after her. He didn't know when she'd developed this bad habit of never listening to him, but she really should break it.

& & &

The town was filled with smoke and Vash tried not to cough. He grabbed Meryls hand as they ran toward the house so that he wouldn't loose her in the blind.

"Milly?" Meryl called. "Milly!"

They were both brought up short when they saw the house where they had been staying at. It was a smoking ruin. Something had thoroughly trashed it.

"Knives!" Vash called demandingly, certain that his brother had been at the root of this particular destruction spree. The other two houses beside the place where they had been staying were both fine, it was only that house that had been destroyed.

Incongruously, he heard Meryl muttering something about not being able to collect the security deposit. What a thing to worry about right then, but it had the ring of someone concentrating on trivialities in order to deal with a situation that was swiftly spinning out of any ability to control.

There was the sound of explosions nearby, people were screaming and running around, there was even the sound of an automatic rifle or two. Someone had obviously gotten the positively brilliant idea to try to take out whoever was attacking them by firing blindly into the smoke. Friendly fire wasn't friendly at all. Vash was torn between trying to go and put a stop to the situation, and trying to go and find where his brother might have gotten off to _this _time.

The innate caution of just how dangerous Knives really was, especially when he was mad, won out and Vash quickly cast about for his brother. They hadn't been gone for more than a few hours down in those caves according to the positions of the suns so he had to be still in the area somewhere.

"Your brother isn't here," a sinister voice said from somewhere in the mist of the smoke that blanketed everything in sight, obscuring anything in veiw for more than a few feet in front of him.

Vash automatically thrust Meryl behind him to sheild her from whatever danger was threatening. He didn't want her on the battlefeild, but if she was, then he'd make damned certain she was safe at his side.

"But he ordered that I should stay behind and keep you company," the voice continued.

Ordered? That meant only one thing... another of Knives' servants. Vash should have _known _it wasn't over with.

:_Double Dammit_!: Vash took a breath to ask where Knives was but a scream to the left grabbed his attention.

It was a scream of fear rather than pain, and by now Vash could tell the difference.

"Milly!" Meryl exclaimed, recognizing it immediately. You wouldn't think it to look at her, but when his short girl took it into her head that there was somewhere she needed to be, she could be awfully darned quick! She darted off into the smoke before Vash could so much as grab her collar to keep her where he could see her.

"Tell your friend to let her go," Vash commanded, trying his best not to sound entreating. The only way to get his girls safe was to get them out of here.

"It doesn't work that way," the sourceless voice said, chuckling.

Vash was well acquainted with the many tricks of sound and smoke that could be played, ventriloquisim, and "throwing the voice" so he should have been able to pinpoint the source of the voice, but it was like it came from all round him. He knew it was not telepathy, because it didn't have that particularly _intimate _quality to it. He looked around alertly for any shadow or thickening in the mist that might give him a target.

"How does it work then?" Vash asked, playing along in order to buy time.

"The master needs to borrow one of your little toys. Insurance, you understand," the sourceless voice replied in a conversational tone. He chuckled a little at his own stupid pun.

"He can't have her," Vash replied, his voice a growl, and his mood all the worse for the fact that the morning had begun so promisingly.

He hated it when things went wrong, as they so often did in his life. For once, just once, he'd like a constant in his life other than sorrow, and pain and death. No way in hell was he letting his brother take _either _of the insurance girls into his untender care. If he'd inflict eternal suffering on his own twin brother, Vash didn't even want to contemplate the kind of horrors he'd inflict on them.

"This is not a negotiation," the voice informed him. "He promises that the human of yours that he borrows will be returned to you, eventually, without a mark on her... provided of course that you play by the rules."

"And what are the rules?" Vash demanded next. "He knows already that I won't do what he wants. I won't harm a human and I won't take a life. I especially won't do what he wants and rid the world of them. I can't imagine any other game that he wants to play."

"The Master has graciously decided to revise the game a bit, for your sake of course," the voice informed him.

"Oh, of _course_," Vash said with heavy irony.

"The master will take one of yours and promise that she will not be harmed under his care, but you will go to the town of Stryfe eighty iles south of the Southern Cornelia Region, located near the Crackback canyons."

Vash frowned momentarily at the coincidence; Stryfe was Meryl's last name. It wasn't uncommon on Gunsmoke to give names like that to towns that sprung up, Vash knew of six towns named Drybones, eight different Despairs, a handful of Fallens and at least twelve different towns named Purgatory.

"What does he want me to do there, or is it another trap?" Vash asked, hoping that maybe the jerk was feeling superior and magnanimous.

There was no answer other than a laugh. Vash shook his head and walked off in the direction that he thought he'd seen Meryl run off in. If not eternal suffering, his brother was going to be the death of him yet. Maybe he could still stop him from carrying off Milly or hurting Meryl. He looked around frantically, searching desperately for her outline in the black, choking mist that smelled of charcoal and fear. Somewhere back towards the town people were still running about screaming in fear and/or pain. Vash felt the pull of their need as an almost physical sensation, but the quest he was on right then took precedence; he didn't need Knives getting even _more _leverage on him than he had already.

Due to some quirk of the wind, or perhaps divine providence had decided to help him out for a change, there was a sudden billow of breeze in the smoke and the miasma thinned and dispersed in one spot, just enough for him to make out the forms of his girls.

Milly was slumped over on the ground nearby, not unconscious, but writhing and squirming in a way that indicated that she was fighting against restraints and not in pain.

"Sempai!" Milly was yelling hoarsely.

The nominal kidnapper was a man that was half a head taller than Vash himself was, and built like a boulder. He wore a strange sort of armor, red with the soft sheen of plastic or some other material like it rather than metal. In form and size he was definitely something to be reckoned with, probably meant as another distraction for Vash at some later date, as it stood right then, the guy had his hands full, literally. He was struggling to keep hold of Meryl, but it was like watching an adult wrestle with a kitten that absolutely had no intention of being held.

Meryl for her part was fighting like a girl. A biting, scratching, eye-gouging, nose-bashing, hair-pulling, neck-jabbing, knee-kicking, nut-crushing, solar-plexus-hitting, all-weak-points-are-fair-game girl. Meryl had definitely taken some training in martial arts at some point in her life because she was going for all the usual vulnerable spots that would under ordinary circumstances have brought a man to his knees or possibly even killed him, with a methodical ferociousness that was something to behold. Whoever had coined the phrase "harmless as a kitten" had obviously never _had _one, those things had claws that they weren't adverse to sinking into tender flesh and a mouthful of very sharp pointy teeth that they weren't at all afraid to use. Perhaps Meryl was kitten sized when compared to her would-be captor but she was five feet of pure fight and she was going at him for all she was worth.

"Lemme go damn you!" Meryl growled, still struggling. "I'll personally vivisect you, rip out your entrails and wrap them around your neck for a garrote! I'll snap your arm off and beat you with it!"

Her inventive curses only seemed to amuse her captor however.

He didn't dare shoot at the enemy for fear he'd hit Meryl, true, he was the best shot around but he just didn't dare risk it, not with her life on the line.

:_Perhaps I should risk it anyway_: he thought darkly to himself.

If this guy won and Meryl got taken to his brother, her life wouldn't be worth living. That wasn't his detirmination to make. Vash waited patiently, gun drawn and pointed at the man trying to abscond with his short girl, just waiting for the first clear shot he could make.

"Sempai!" Milly cried again, struggling harder against whatever her captors had put on her to restrain her. Vash momentarily thought about just throwing himself into the fray, but then thought better of it; the enemy had a hostage, no matter how she fought against him, if he made a move in that direction, there was a chance they'd kill her and just take the other one while Vash was distracted. Vash, more than anything, didn't want to fail. He couldn't loose her.

Vash's heart surged for an instant as she almost won free. Vash fired, aiming for a crack in his nameless enemies armor, but it missed by just a hair and shattered uselessly against the plate. Meryls gun did not have nearly the power that his own had. Her arms were much more slender and less well-muscled than his own so she wouldn't be able to handle the kind of recoil that Vash could take and still fire accurately. His trusty longcolt would probably have sent her flying across the room.

"Oh Vash..." the voice from out of the mists said. "I would suggest that you look towards the town."

With a plummeting feeling in his stomach, Vash reluctantly glanced away from where Meryl was struggling back toward the town where just a few days ago he'd helped Meryl buy groceries like they were a pair of newly weds and she'd teased him about eating the entire box of donuts. There, in the place of what had once been a peaceful haven, was a raging inferno like something out of a nightmare vision. What was worse was that instead of it being a chaotic raging inferno there was a definite method to it, every building was on fire, but only in certain places, and in the town square a crowd made of all of the townsfolk was gathered in the middle, ringed in on all sides by a wall of fire too hot and too thick to jump through. One poor brave soul tried it however, the sight of him writhing and screaming on the ground and the accompanying smell of cooked flesh was enough to prevent anyone else from trying.

The meaning was clear, either let Knives' servant carry off his short girl or the whole village and everyone in it would be burned alive. Always with the _choices_. Vash felt another flash of anger at his brother; always, always, _always _with the _choices_! Why did Vash always get the bad decisions, why couldn't Knives for once have to make the hard choices, why couldn't he have to live with the consequences. When would Knives ever learn any resposibility if he never had to take responsibility for the consequences of his actions. Knives always thought he was above such trifling mundane things as consequences.

"Dammit!" he cursed feelingly.

His anger was mounting, partly at his brother for putting him in the situation, yet again, partly at his own helplessness. This wasn't a choice so much as an ultimatum anyway, Knives knew Vash wouldn't let them destroy an entire village full of innocents especially when the offer made to him said that the other party would be safe from harm so long as his brother played along. Now, whether Vash could actually believe that was true was another matter entirely.

He looked helplessly back at where Meryl struggled against her captor, intending to promise her that he'd find her soon, but instead what he saw was the man intending to carry her off land a blow to her head that made her go limp abruptly, like a puppet that's strings had been cut. Something in him that had been put to the straining point in recent months just _snapped_.

Vash's sight suddenly narrowed. The only thing in the world he saw was her unconscious body being held in the dirty hands of that unwashed beast who had the gall to put his hands all over Vash's... His vision hazed over into a blue-white light as a protective rage flooded him. If she had been alert and still struggling, Vash would likely have been able to reign it in like he usually did, but it was the fact that she was limp and peaceful, unable to resist while some interloper was allowed to _smear _himself on her when Vash himself was only able to look on longingly but never to touch, that unleashed some dark stranger inside of him. That living inferno inside of him went from a magma-hot anger to a cold, chill, killing rage that was like a separate entity rousing from deep within, uncoiling like a slumbering dragon.

The world around him faded to a background buzz and he felt the power push up from inside of him, like his body was giving painful delivery to a child made of fire and rage. He was dimly aware that feathers had begun to sprout from his shoulders, instead of being clean and white, they were ebony-black and crackling with a violet-red lightning that crawled all over him, weaving through his hair and skittering over his clothes. A sourceless wind kicked up around him as his eyes went from being two points of pure blue-white light that presaged the arrival of the Diablo to an ominous scarlet red.

Diablo with an angel arm was enough to take out an entire city, and that was while Vash was consciously trying to close the arm back up, seal off its power, and do as little damage as possible. When he had fought his brother using his angel arm, Vash had still not be interested in trying to hurt Knives, he'd only wanted to use just enough to cancel his brother's power out. In short, Vash had never really tried to truly _use _his angel arm. The marble-carven image of rage that his face had twisted into said that he wasn't having a single such qualm now. He wanted the world, and his enemies, to **_hurt_**.

With that thought the scarlet-death in his eyes intensified, and the very air around him condensed and went chill, reeking of ozone and the promise of retribution. He was revenge made form, and for once he was going to see that those who stood against him would not get the chance to do so again. The world would _hurt_, hurt the same way that _he _was hurting. Red, scarlet, crimson overtook the former white of pure energy and he was made vengeance incarnate, scarlet-black power shreiked and hissed around him and he looked at the world through a haze of red.

The world had never seen the avatar that that color would bring into being.


	13. Waking Up, But Definintely Not In Vegas

**_Give her back._**

Vash, or rather the vengeance-god that Vash had transformed into, didn't even bother speaking out loud. The lowly insect would either obey or be crushed from the inside out. The thing didn't seem to be aware of its impending doom, because it just smirked back at Vash and turned to leave without obeying the explicit order that it had been given. Vash readied a Psi-bolt in his hand and was about to unleash it...

:_Brother_?: Knives' voice sounded inside his mind, sounding for all the world like he was surprised.

Vash, for his part, smacked the offending presence away from him as one might swat a fly. He didn't want to bother with his brother right then, his only enemy for the moment was right in front of him, attempting to abscond with the woman under his protection. He readied himself again to incinerate that smirking creature that dared to try to take what was _his _when...

Something hard and heavy suddenly hit him upside the head. Vash's head jerked around to glare at the idiot who had had the gall to throw something at him. A woman stood there, defiant against the reddish glare of his gaze, with another rock in her hand.

"Mister Vash!" she yelled at him, sounding for all the world like a younger sibling scolding the older one when they were about to go and do something stupid. "Stop that_ right now_!"

He paused, something inside of him seemed to blink awake, like it had momentarily fallen asleep. It rushed to take stock and quickly agreed with the woman who was trying to obstruct them from his goal. Why should he stop? That uncouth barbarian was making off with what was rightfully his!

"Sempai wouldn't want you to free her if it meant doing something like this!" the woman continued.

Against all the rage he was feeling at that very moment, the powerful emotion that said that he should get back what was his at any cost, there was also a spark within himself, small, but growing in intensity that said she was right and this wasn't really what he wanted.

Of course this was what he wanted!

_No_, the voice inside of him said firmly. _Let her go if we must, but don't harm him_. Knives gave his word that she would be fine and they'd have to trust that until the time came that he could get Meryl back safe with him. Killing was never the answer.

Let her go? As if he could trust the word of someone who'd gone out of his way at every opportunity to make them hurt. No! That creature was his enemy, and he would destroy all obstacles before him, especially ones that had the nerve to touch what he himself could not. Crimson Diablo readied another Psi-bolt, determined that this time he would utterly annihilate the enemy that stood before him, and there would be no distractions.

Still, that nagging pernicious little presence shoved to the back of his mind tried to get in the way, it screamed at him, begging him to stop what he was doing, that this wasn't the way! It tried in vain to seal off his power, the true power of his arm, even as scarlet-black energy gathered into a dark hole in the air before him ready spill out into the world in a shadow touched with blood-red light, wiping out all in its path. He wanted revenge! For all the times his own brother had hurt him, had made him suffer again and again, for all the times that he'd been tossed aside and turned away, denied and betrayed. He wanted the world and his enemies to know his pain, and he'd start with the one right in front of him that had dared to lay his hands on, and harm, her.

_This isn't the way... no-one has the right to take the life of another_. The little voice begged him even as it tried desperately to curtail the power that was being gathered up, ready to be unleashed. _She won't be happy with this, think of the lecture I'll get once she finds out that another town got wiped out because of me._

The Crimson Diablo of Vengeance paused, considering. Her lectures were formidable. Seeing an opening, the voice rushed on, trying to persuade him to mercy. Not only would she not be happy with him, it might even make her cry, and Meryl hated to cry.

The kidnapper saw him hesitate and took that opportunity to disappear into the mists.

Now look what he'd done! Crimson would have to hunt him down to get her back, and the window of opportunity was closing. He should have let him blast the enemy while he'd had the chance. The stupid little voice in the back of the head then asked how he was planning on anihilating his enemy without hurting Meryl.

He'd have managed.

The voice queried again, if there was still a chance to save her from being kidnapped, what was the safest way to go about it? Well that one was easy... Destroy the mists.

The shadow-crimson Psi-bolt grew from the tiny-pinpoint black-hole into a sizable tear in the fabric of the world, red black lighting hissed and skittered over it, like plasma-lighting over a lightning rod, begging to be released.

The voice in the back of his head sobbed in denial even as Crimson at last located the source of the choking mists and with a slight flick of his hands sent another Psi-bolt off in that direction. The enemy was...

_Stop. Please. Just stop_.

But he had one other thing to take care of, his dear dear brother had wanted his powers unleashed, well he'd gotten his wish. He'd ordered his underlings to take a hostage, well it was about time that Knives stopped getting things all his own way. It appeared that they still had a score to settle. Crimson cast about for his enemy,the one that had taken her out from his custody by force, the one that had hit her and made her loose consciousness, and readied yet another Psi-bolt in preparation.

Scarlet shadows kissed the air before him, hissing like a living thing, feeling almost anticipatory as they grew to greater size and power. Coiling round themselves the power grew in strength, greater and greater as Crimson held it aloft over his head like Atlas with the world. It would be enough to destroy anything that stood in his way.

_No_! the voice inside him screamed even as Crimson Diablo smiled, and let go. The very air around him screamed like the wind of a gale-force sandstorm, except that the air was _cold_, cold as the air in the upper atmosphere, and it smelled of lightning-struck ozone. Darkness burst out from the sphere of power he had gathered into being in a crashing wave of force that burned away everything before it.

The sound of people screaming and running puzzeled him for a moment, they were not targets and thus would not be harmed so why were they so afraid. The voice inside his head, which was gaining strength, inch by inch, told him that they didn't know that. The mists receded before the darkness even and buildings and towers crumbled and disintegrated into a fine grey powder and blew away on the winds of destruction. Crimson was satisfied with this, let the world know that he was not to be taken lightly. The power swept even through him, crashing over and through him and he welcomed it, letting it take him as it would. The tiny voice tried to cling on but all was lost in the rush of power and fury.

& & &

"Papa?" she asked curiously, looking at the dreamscape all around her. She was in her favorite little hidey-hole in the canyons, her favorite place in the world when she'd been a little girl. The cavern walls were dotted here and there with child's chalk drawings, strange little spirals with little circles along them and writings in "secret codes" to amuse herself with. She somehow recognized them, as if they were familiar to her, like she'd known them once long ago. it felt eerie, like a memory from a dream. The sandy floor of the spot was littered with little bits and bits and ends of stuff, "treasures" discovered on her "digs" that would make her famous, a tin whistle here and a plastic bow and arrow set there.

Her father looked at her with wise and youthful silvery eyes that matched her own staring out at her from a face that seemed to be too old and knowing to be _his _face. The papa she remembered was more like an absent-minded professor; always ready with a word of praise for her drawings or inventions but otherwise absorbed in his work. There had been times, especially as she got older, when Meryl had felt more like she was taking care of him rather than the other way around. He'd had a habit of getting so absorbed in his work that he forgot to eat. Meryl got the odd feeling that the person standing before her wasn't her father so much as it was a _representation _of her father. This intuition came to her in the pattern of most dreams, where even the most nonsensical things are accepted and being true, and trivialities seem vitally important.

"...still having a little trouble with the tertiary grid on that one, but don't worry my dear, we'll get it," he said, continuing a conversation that Meryl could in no way remember having with him.

"Papa? Where are you?" she asked, surprised to hear the note of needy panic in her voice.

"I have always been here," he said, looking at her with a laser intensity at odds with his usual absent-minded character.

"I don't understand," she said. "What's going on?" She was again surprised at how like a small frightened child she sounded, because she knew in that dream-knowing that she was an adult.

"Meryl, you've been gone for so long."

He pointed to the ground at her feet and there was another one of those spiraling knot-work patterns... but there was also a small, young child-version of herself writing it out, talking in a child's sing-song about what was in it. A moment later the Meryl-child waved her hand over it and made it light up, the patterns flowing with liquid quicksilver, the air above it shivered and misted then rain fell for a brief instant. Child-Meryl clapped her hands and the father-person in her dream patted the top of the Meryl-child's head and praised her.

"It's time for you to _wake up_," he said, but his voice wasn't quite the voice she remembered. It had a strage resonant quality to it, like many voices were echoing in behind his own. Distantly she caught the notes of a hauntingly beautiful song on the edge of her hearing, sung by voices that were inhumanly beautiful.

"Huh? But... I don't understand," Meryl said, looking around her in confusion.

"You've been gone for so long, but _we have always been here_. Now it is time for you to wake up."

"But I don't--" Meryl felt a sudden fear replace her confusion. There was something she needed to remember, something important.

"You need to wake up!"

She gasped and started in surprise, a feeling of panic flooding her system and then just as quickly she felt sleepy again. She was awake, but something was preventing her from staying that way. Her native stubbornness kicked in, if someone wanted her asleep then she was determined to do the opposite.

Meryl fought and fought hard to open her eyes, beating back the soporific tide of torpor through a sheer act of will. Her body felt numb, and her head, when it wasn't throbbing slightly, felt like it was floating disconnected from her body, stuffed with wool. It was strange, but it felt as though the sleep was actually _fighting _to retain her. An instant later, as she got a good whiff of the air around her, she realized what it was. She was being _drugged_. An incense burner nearby was lit with glowing red coals that emitted a sickly-sweet scent, one that belonged to the flower of a trunk-cactus; the juice of the trunk-cactus was a mild hallucinogenic and the crushed essence of the flower bulbs could be made into a sedative.

Still fighting to stay awake, Meryl took a vague stock of what she could discern about her situation. She'd been tied by her own rope from her spelunking harness with her arms and hands behind her back. She was inside a cage, one of those big, metal dog-kennels that people used for securing attack dogs, and Meryl burned momentarily from the back-handed insult. The anger had the beneficent effect of clearing her head a little bit and making it a bit easier to concentrate. Her head still felt like it was stuffed with wool, there was a soft buzzing noise in her ears but as Meryl put her cheek down onto the floor of the kennel she realized that it was the hum of vibration. They were _moving_.

A soft clinking noise against the bars of the cage made her realize that she was actually secured to it. Her right ankle had a handcuff around it linked directly to one of the thin side bars.

She had been taken captive and was now being moved to a place she did not know. Her chest seized up in dismay and fear as the memories of what had transpired the last time she had been conscious came back to her. She had been taken by Knives (or rather, one of his henchmen), Vash must be worried sick. At least Milly was safe, that was one small mercy.

She had to get the heck out of here. Meryl tested the bounds of her cage, the door was bolted by several locks on both sides of the door and the joins had all been welded shut. The cage had been designed to contain the struggling mass of an animal that was probably twice her weight, so she was locked in good. To top it off, the chain around her ankle (added to rub it in, she was sure) was not budging in the least. She might not be able to escape.

:_No, I'm not going to accept that_,: Merly thought to herself.

She hadn't made Class A-1 Disaster Investigator by folding under and playing the meek, fainting maiden every time something bad happened to her. She was _going _to get out of there!

:_Don't worry Milly_,: she thought at her friend as she hunkered down to take a better look at her cage. :_I'll join you soon_.:

* * *

**Better and better! I hope you all enjoyed this one, drop me a note to tell me how you liked it, and I'll see you all Thursday my dears.**

**~Nightheart  
**


	14. Amber Waves

:_I need some way to get these drugs out of my system_: she thought vaguely.

Even since her strange visit to the hidden cave, things had been getting weirder and weirder for Meryl. Sometimes, when she concentrated now, the world seemed to get... strangely fuzzy. It was as if the thing that she had accepted as "reality" all this time, the solid, tangible world she'd always been accustomed to dealing with, was nothing more than a veneer over some _other _kind of world. It was a world made of strange vibrations, of tiny things like oil on top of water that rippled and moved over the surface slightly when she looked at them... it was like seeing dust motes hanging in the air at sunset; you don't notice them usually, unless the light hits them just right and then suddenly they were lit up and so pretty that it was almost impossible to ignore them.

When she saw things this way it was like things got suddenly very _clear_... and very complex. It was like she was able to look past the solid reality of things and into the particles that made them up. When she'd looked at Vash for that first moment he'd seemed to be made of light. There were darker blotches on his chest and other areas where he wasn't made of flesh but his entire body had shone with a brilliant white incandescence she'd nearly needed to shield her eyes against. She'd sensed something peculiar about his right arm.

Meryl, like recalling some vague memory from a dream, realized that this "blindness" hadn't _always _been there. When she'd been a small child living with her father she'd seen the world a lot differently. People had had a net of small colored threads woven through their bodies that they'd never seemed to be aware of, the threads in those nets had glowed ever so faintly and had had a flow in them like electrical current through a wire. Some very special people had had a strange sort of "skin" over their own like oil on top of water.

:_I wonder how I ever forgot that_: she thought in vague mystification.

It seemed strange that she'd go blind to and forget about something she'd grown up knowing as a child. But every time she'd brought to subject up in her uncles house she'd been quickly silenced and disapproval had been expressed...

:Those drugs, the doctor gave me: she realized. They had been ostensibly to help her to "adjust" after the death of her father but she now knew thier true purpose. They'd been to block her ability, to make her "normal" like everyone else. Meryl felt an irrational surge of anger at the two adults who had been so high handed as to put her on a drug program that robbed her of a gift she'd been born with. Meryls contrary streak came out in full force. If they hadn't wanted her to use it, then that was exactly what she was going to do!

She closed her eyes, trying not to fall back asleep while she did so, and concentrated trying to manage the particular mental twist that enabled her to See things in that strange fashion. When she'd been a child it had been easy, natural as breathing, but she hadn't done it since she'd been quite young. Maybe it was like riding a bicycle.

After a number of frustrating false starts, Meryl was about ready to give up and just try to escape the old fashioned way when she at last managed a particular mental yank and twist. Meryl felt strangely dizzy for a moment but when she opened her eyes...

It was like the time she'd had a bad head cold for a week, and everything had been heard like her ears were submerged in water, now suddenly it was all _clear_! The strange vibration of the air was a soft music to her again and she wondered how she'd ever _not _noticed how silent everything always was.

She stared at the thin metal bar that was the only thing she could see in front of her face, and as she concentrated on it, she Saw it more clearly; it turned vaguely fuzzy and the tiny tiny dust-mote particles that made up the material in it bobbed and swayed like cork on water before her eyes. She knew innately that the tiny dust motes were the things that made the metal what it was, and that it could be changed. She just couldn't remember how. She had to remember how. But she _couldn't remember_.

Those drugs were a nuisance! They were blocking her ability to concentrate by making her want to fall back asleep. Meryl wriggled a bit in her cage, trying to scoot over to where the drugged incense was burning in its burner.

:Gotta... gotta switch it off somehow: she thought vaguely.

With another strange indescribable mental twist, Meryl turned her sight inward. Using those abilities was hard to describe, it was like an amputee suddenly having their limb restored to them and now had to learn how to use it again. Something in her, some deep instinct that she hadn't been aware of or simply hadn't paid attention to, _knew _how she was supposed to make it work.

The inner sight Meryl "looked" at herself with showed something that looked to her like a tiny glowing nebula with rings of strange "treads" surrounding it. The threads were of a strange cloudy light that shifted colors like the patterns of aurora borelis that she'd once been far enough north with her father to see with her own eyes. They flowed like miniature streams of light that coruscated with sunset colors, and the patterns they formed around the "star" of nebulous white power in the center like the dust cloud at the center of a galaxy were so intricate that they made her eyes swim. It was like trying to look at one of those pictures of and ancient celtic knotwork pattern, one where there were several knots all together; a sense of the general overall design could be seen, but all of the individual strands that twined and twisted round one another was lost in the intricacy.

The young woman wasn't quite certain where the knowledge came from, whether it was from herself or some power outside herself, but she knew as certainly as she knew her own name that those glowing threads carried her vital essence, her life energy, out along her body. Damage to those threads meant damage to herself, and damage to herself meant damage to those threads.

Meryl cocked her metaphysical head to one side as she noticed something odd. The strands of light that she instinctively knew had something to do with the way her body worked were not the only ones there! Interwoven with the strands of light were strange duller strands, by themselves they might have appeared silvery, like moonlight glimmering on water, but when placed next to the glowing strands that carried her life essence they appeared dull like pewter compared to silver. Those darkish threads had a strangely "dead" feel to them, the glowing threads felt alive with energy and power but those other ones felt empty. Meryl couldn't imagine for the life of her what those other threads might be for... maybe everyone had them and just didn't know it. That strange knowledge that Meryl didn't know the source of, but couldn't bring herself to disbelieve, told her that this wasn't the case. She was unique, _special_.

She tried to shake her head at herself, she was a woman of science and the world, she believed only in what she could see and touch and measure and prove. "It just is" would never be an answer she would be satisfied with. All of this mystical strangeness trying to enter her life was more than unsettling. Maybe there was a reason that her uncle had kept her and her brother on inhibitor drugs.

:_But_,: a little part of her spoke up. :_Just because you don't want to see it or have to deal with it, doesn't mean that it's just going to go away_.:

Meryl had to admit that her inner voice had a good point. Just because she hadn't known the true nature of Vash's clash with the Gung Ho Guns didn't mean they hadn't still nearly taken out the town when they had fought. And just because she hadn't known Legato's abilities hadn't meant that she hadn't been completely taken over by him on That Day. And just because she found this sudden new knowledge of herself a little unsettling didn't mean that she shouldn't try to figure it out for herself. Knowledge was power after all, and that went doubly so for knowledge about herself. "He who knows not his enemy and not himself stands little chance of victory in a battle" as Sun-Tzu had written. It was just as true for this situation as for any other and with an enemy that was likely as powerful as the one she was going to be facing, she needed every advantage she could get. That included knowledge that she had once had and forced herself to forget.

:_So_: she told herself. :_I'll just have to accept this new world as it is and move on with things_.:

Okay, so then, the first priority was figuring out a way to get the drugs out of her system and preferably out of the air. After she was thinking clearly she'd be better able to plan her next move. Meryl looked more closely at the intricate knotwork patterns of glowing threads...

"Meridians," she remembered suddenly.

They were called meridians. They flowed throughout the body in a constant flowing cycle and there were points in the body where they all connected and energy pooled there but didn't collect, it instead was continuously cycling through. The star at the center of her little meridian galaxy then was both the source of the energy and the place where it flowed into. Meryl wasn't certain what would happen if the star was harmed in any way, but she was pretty sure that it wouldn't be good.

:_Best to begin at the beginning_: she told herself and took a look at the center nebula.

Sure enough, there were knotwork strands of meridians flowing out of the energy pool (she had to think of something better to call it) and those were all glowing healthy vibrant colors that would put the most beautiful sunset to shame, even comparing them to the Northern lights was a dim comparison, they were a hundred times more brilliant and saturated. Meryl's concentration narrowed as she noted something. The meridans flowing into the source-star-nebula-thingy were... less brilliant. They were dimmer, almost blotchy in some places.

They looked sick.

Without even really understanding or realizing how she did it, something inside Meryl made those "extra" dull pewter strands seek out and wrap around the sick meridians, and with another strange mental twist the dull pewter not-meridians connected to the source at the center of her little internal galaxy. The dull strands, acting like a channel connected to a water source, suddenly filled with pure white light, shining pale silvey-blue-white. The sickness was like an oily black tar clinging with pernicious tenacity to the shining healthy strands of her meridians but the shining light burned it away from where-ever she touched it with.

Meryl suddenly felt a vibrancy in her, like a little tiny peice she hadn't realized had been missing from her life was suddenly restored to her. She'd done this before! It was so _familiar_ now that she realized it, and she wondered how she had never noticed that she was lacking it. This was vital to her!

The "dull" meridians purified and Meryl "flowed" up their pathways wringing the dark clinging sickness out of them like a housewife would wring out a dishrag. At last she met back up at the source, her body purged of all unnatural toxins. Her head felt worlds clearer! She could tell by the sickly-sweet smell in the air that the drug was still hanging about however and it wouldn't take long before she was back in the same drugged state that she had just managed to get out of.

She knew innately that every time she used those "channels" for something, she was going to loose a little bit more of that energy she had. She also knew that some of the energy could be replaced by food and sleep, but the most important part of it was what she had been born with and that if she used that part of it up, she'd be dead. So it would be best if she didn't rely on this strange new ability for everything, she couldn't afford to run out of power.

With her head clear but growing ever more groggy as the drugs began to take effect with each passing moment, Meryl looked around her. She was in a bare metal rectangular room approximately five by eight, not a storage closet, but not a place that was made to accommodate guests either. There was a door on either end of the narrow ends of the room. Her cage was bolted to the floor. And there was another cage next to hers!

Meryl thought about trying to wake up the drugged sleeping form in the cage next to hers with a shout but thought better of it. She didn't want to attract the attention of the probable guards outside the room. Meryl had to assume that the person or people who had kidnapped her wouldn't have bothered abducting her and then leave her unguarded. She was just lucky that the guard was outside the door and not in there with them... the drugs in the air were probably the reason.

:_Maybe they're counting on the drugs to do their guarding for them_: Meryl thought hopefully.

There was a chance that the two prisoners had indeed been left unguarded; after all, they were supposed to be firmly in the grip of the drugs so they in all likelihood wouldn't be going anywhere. It was a hopeful thought that Meryl didn't dare put her trust in, she'd probably only get one shot at escape; if it failed they'd probably either kill her for being too much trouble to keep alive or find another way to incarcerate her that she had no chance of getting out of.

Meryl turned her thoughts away from the chilling reality of her situation and went back to taking stock of her surroundings. She was still tied with one ankle attached to the wires of her cage, but Meryl was still wearing almost everything that she had been when she'd been taken! They'd removed her harness and the ropes and pitons.

There was a door at either end of the room. The soft noise surrounding the room and the vibration of the floor was suddenly familiar to her, they were on some kind of transport. She couldn't make out just what kind but she just knew that she and this other person were being moved somewhere.

So, she was being transported somewhere and she didn't think that it was a place that she was going to want to go. She didn't know where she was right then, she didn't know what direction she had been transported in while sleeping, she didn't have any real points of reffernce but it was a pretty safe bet that it was likely somewhere out in the middle of the desert. If they were out in the middle of the desert and she actually managed to escape without any supplies whatsoever it would be like trading possible-death for certain-death. Most people would say that it was better the devil you knew than the devil you didn't, but Meryl wasn't having any of that. She wanted out of this place! The first thing to do would be to get the drugs out of the air.

There was a window on one side to her left that she could not see out of from her current vantage point near the floor. It let in only a faint pale white light, moonlight, so it was probably night outside then. The drugs were burning in an incense burner on a small table nailed to the floor directly underneath the window. What luck! All she needed to do was get to the window and open it just a crack, the smoke would flow out the window and the air would clear.

:_**All **huh_?:

Well, "all" entailed a number of things to do first. She needed to work her hands free of the bonds, then she needed to figure out a way out of the cage, lastly there was that pesky ankle tether to worry about. Meryl squirmed a bit to test her bonds. Whoever had tired her up had tied her good, her wrists were crossed one over the other and the ropes were wound in an X pattern on all angles of them. She had no doubt that all of the real knots were on the inside under the wrapping of rope with a few cursory knots on the outside to secure the ropes. Luckily they had not tied her around the chest either. Her fingers were tingling a little from the lack of circulation but she nonetheless began to quietly work her wrists back and forth against one another to hopefully loosen them a bit. Meryl had always had skinny wrists, so there wasn't a whole lot that could hold her.

"Don't panic," she advised herself in a murmur just to have the comfort of another voice in the silence.

Her cabin mate was out cold. He or she, meryl thought it might be a _she _by the shape of the hips, was curled up on her side, facing away from Meryl. She got an impression of long black hair but the rest of her was a series of indetirminate lumps. No help from that quarter.

Curious, Meryl tried looking over at the stranger using that strange other-sight. At first all she got when she tried was a strange hazy aura surround her body like a second skin made of lightly coruscating colors of blue-greens and some soft roses. They shifted slowly and softly over her form in a soft rainbow skin like oil over water, only more sedate. Meryl wasn't sure what that meant, but slowly her sight began to "clear" and then it was like she was looking directly _into _her. Her body seemed to fade into the background, turning an unimportant colorless grey but in its place was a beautiful complex web-like knotwork pattern of threads spiraling in and out. It was again like looking at an intricate picture made entirely of celtic knotwork, the whole could be easy to see but the individual threads became lost in the weave. The threads themselves were brilliant colored light, that would put the saturated colors of sunset to shame; turquises, emeralds, rose, violet, scarlet, saffron-gold, firey oranges all woven around each other and constantly shifting colors. The "flow" that Meryl could see along the threads was steady but sluggish, like the water was only going at half of its strength. There was an energy pool in what looked to be about her lower back if Meryl was guessing her position right.

"Strange," she muttered to herself.

She shook her head at herself, she wasn't getting any freer by indulging her curiosity.

Next Meryl tried twisting her wrists to see if she couldn't get a little more wriggling room that way and was momentarily elated to meet with some success. Not much, but it was _some_. Meryl didn't need much room to slide her small hands out of something that could hold her tiny slim wrists. Meryl began to chafe her wrists back and forth again. It seemed to take forever! And Meryl lived with the constant fear that whoever might be guarding the door would suddenly come back into the room and see her awake, aware and trying to get free. She stayed laid out on her side, despite the fact that the position was far from comfortable, precisely for this reason; she could just freeze and play dead.

After what seemed like eternities, Meryl managed to work enough give into the bindings to have a likely chance of slipping her hands out when the need arose but she paused in her efforts, weighing her options. If she slipped out right then and someone walked in, they'd know she was trying to escape. She still had the ankle chain to study and the cage to figure out... she wasn't Houdini after all, Meryl had only a very little exposure to lock-picking, and that came second hand from watching her younger brother do it.

She looked down at the cuffs around her ankle, they were just an ordinary pair of handcuffs with one end cuffed to her ankle and the other end cuffed to one of the bars of the cage. All handcuff locks were the same, her brother had told her and it seemed to be true because she had never seen one with a different key.

So it shouldn't be _that _hard to get out of one. The other problem was the cage she was locked up in. It seemed pretty sturdy, of course it would have to be if it were built to hold two-hundred pound attack dogs that probably liked to bash themselves against the bars. Meryl didn't even _weigh _two hundred pounds.

:_So, a cage and a pair of cuffs, and then who knows how many guards or accomplices, and no Milly_.: Meryl sighed internally.

The drugs were starting to seep back into her system little by little, and it had the effect of making it difficult to think because she was getting groggy. She tested the door a little with her foot, even spending a breathless few seconds waiting for her captor to come and investigate the noise when she gave it a good solid two-footed donkey kick from where she lay. Nothing doing, the door and cage wouldn't budge.

Once again that strange almost-double-vision appeared, the one where it seemed like there were two different aspects of the world superimposed over each other, the material world she knew and a different kind of world that it seemed she sometimes remembered in her dreams. Those dreams had stopped when her father had died, or rather she had stopped them. She'd wanted nothing more to do with the strange ability they both had been born with because it had lead to his death, and her uncle had certainly encouraged the aversion. Now it was the return of the repressed. it seemed like the one thing that was going to save her was the thing she'd tried most desperately to ignore.

But she'd forgotten so much. She'd made herself forget to the point where she didn't even know the basic stuff anymore.

:_Well_,: she told herself, taking a rest from her struggles. :_It's all in there somewhere, all I have to do is just try to remember it._:

She didn't really want to. In order to reach the memories she was looking for, she was going to have to trigger other memories, memories she'd tried her hardest to forget. She sighed and closed her eyes, trying to prepare herself a little. This wasn't going to be easy.

* * *

**This chapter was strange and fun to write, I hope you all enjoyed it. Next up we have a small fight and an escape (I think). Look forward to it please and kindly drop a reveiw to tell me how you liked it.**


	15. And so It Begins

Sometimes, you didn't need God for a miracle.

It was a common catchphrse associated with him when Vash the Stampede rolled through town and every single building was oblitterated, but there was not a single casualty. Vash was no longer the Stampede, but sometimes, you _still _didn't need god for a miracle. The entire little town where Meryl had rented a small house for him to return to was currently a smoking heap of rubble, but all of the survivors, men, women and children, were milling about unharmed and wondering what they were supposed to do next. An industrious few had wandered back to the ruins of thier homes and were picking through the rubble for what they could salvage.

Milly sighed, she too, was whole and unharmed, and looked around her.

"Golly," she remarked. "It looks like this time _I'll_ have to fill out the report."

Vash smiled a little at that, it was a wan, ghostly thing, but he was trying. So then.

"I'll have to leave," he said into the silence.

He'd fish his duffle out, (which hadn't been unpacked) and hit the road.

"I'll get my things," Milly said, her voice very matter-of-course.

Vash looked over at her incredulously. She'd _seen _what had just happened, the kind of destruction he could unleash on the world when his self-control finally snapped, and this time he didn't even have to excuse of someone else's mind taking over his. Vash had been the one to unleash his powers, and even though nobody had gotten hurt, the fact still remained that he wasn't just an innocent bystander anymore.

"Stay away from me," he warned her. "You saw what just happened. You saw what I became..."

Guilt stabbed him through the heart. First Legato, and now this; what had he _become_? He hadn't wanted any of this. This wasn't how it was supposed to be, things were supposed to be going _differently _for him, he was supposed to be getting it _right _finally. But everything was wrong, and it was getting worse. Was the demon inside of him a recent development, spawned by breaking his oath, or had it been there all along and he just hadn't known it? Was he turning into Knives?

"I'm a monster," he muttered brokenly.

"Don't be silly," Milly chided him, toeing through the dust and debris of what had been their little house only an hour or two ago. "You're not a monster. Sure, you're not like most people, but you're not a monster Mister Vash. Monsters don't eat donuts and play in the streets with little kids."

She grunted a little as she pulled aside a particularly large piece of debris. Vash, without even consciously thinking about it, moved over to help her out.

"Second," she grunted as they both strained one of the ceiling beams from the wreckage. "Even though I know you did your best, they still got sempai. If nothing else, I'm going to have to follow you around until we get her back. I'm sure sempai would say that the work doesn't stop just because she's not there to oversee us."

Vash smiled again, this time with real amusement. Yeah, he was certain that's _exactly _what she'd say, other then he should get off his lazy butt and do something. It was his fault in a way, he hadn't known that Knives was going to keep his vendetta up for certain, but it had been a real possibility and he should never have brought him back to this place; doing so had put Meryl in danger and directly resulted in her being taken. Knives had said he'd wanted to use her as insurance against Vash's good behavior.

:_Heh, he's using my insurance girl for **insurance**_...: Vash thought trying desperately to find at least a little amusement in the joke to cling to.

"Ah-ha!" Milly gave a cry of triumph.

Out of the dust and debris she pulled that ugly pink suitcase that Meryl was always lugging around with her. It was still mostly full. Meryl, oddly enough, hadn't unpacked anything but clothes and the most essential of things from it; apparently she'd just bought extras of the things she needed for daily use and kept the spares just in case she needed to go somewhere in a hurry, it seemed that old habits were hard to break.

"We should keep it with us, for when we find her," Milly said with habitual optimism. "Meryl would want to have her things with her, don't you think Mister Vash?"

Vash just nodded, still feeling a little hollow inside.

A few moments later and a little more rummaging had produced Milly's travel case and stun-gun as well. Vash triangulated where his own room would be and started working on the debris there. Milly came over a moment later to help and a little while after that, they'd found it. The shaving kit and some of the clothes were missing from it, but that was all he'd bothered to unpack in the few days he'd been in town.

The two tomases that Meryl had brought with her to the town for her and Milly to use were still hitched to the hitching post near their water trough and food bowl around the back near the fence. They were unharmed, munching calmly away at their food, unconcerned with the rampant chaos and destruction happening all around them. They were remarkably stupid beasts.

Milly went over and pulled the saddles and blankets and saddlebags off the top of the fence nearby and busied herself with getting the two staid beasts kitted out for a long ride. Vash blinked at her, he wasn't in the habit of riding; Tomases never seemed to like him very well for some reason.

"We're riding?" he asked, surprised.

"It'll get us there faster," she said. "And I wouldn't feel right just leaving them behind. So where are we going?"

"South," Vash said. "Past the McLillian Highwastes, there's a wash. On the other side of that there's the Crackback Canyons, you've heard of them, right?"

"Yes," Milly said. "My daddy says that some people think they were carved out by water that used to be here on this world a long time ago that just faded away. They're supposed to be enormous, taking days and days and days to travel through... if you don't get lost, that is."

"Well, Knives says that there's a small town there called Stryfe--"

"Just like Sempai!" Milly exclaimed.

"Probably just a coincidence," Vash replied. "There's lots of towns with names like that, and some families take their names from the towns they were born in. Anyway, Knives says there's something he wants me to see there, hopefully, it's not another of his assassins. As long as he's got Meryl, I'll play by his rules. I can't risk her getting hurt."

Milly blinked in surprise at him.

"We're... we aren't going to go after her?"

"That's exactly what he expects," Vash argued. "And part of me, I'm sad to say, thinks that that's what he's _hoping _for. Knives isn't happy with me right now, and since he's got someone I care fo- er, Short Girl, I don't want to give him any reason at all to hurt her to get at me, understand?"

Milly nodded glumly, seeing the sense in his reasoning.

"But then... how are we going to get sempai back?" she asked next.

"We'll have to wait a bit," he said reluctantly. "And negotiate with Knives once he's cooled off. I don't like it any more than you do, but it's the only way I can think of to get her back safe and sound."

"Alright then," Milly said, accepting it. Meryl would have raised a bit more of a fuss, or tried to come up with an alternate strategy, probably one involving her foot and Knives' ass. Milly didn't waste time, she just accepted that this was the best thing he could think of to do, and got on with it. Vash partly wished she'd argue with him about it, because the _last _thing he wanted to do right then was to turn around and start traveling in the other direction, father away from where he saw them carrying her away last. Maybe, because it was the last thing he wanted to do, that was the reason he _should _do it.

:_Her safety comes first_,: he told himself, fighting down the urge to just rush after his enemies and get her back as soon as possible. Knives had no difficulties in ordering his men to kill the hostage after all.

:_I'll deal with Knives later_.:

Milly mounted up and pointed her tomas in the direction of the nearest town to the south, they'd resupply there before getting started on their way. Vash had his duffle, and Milly hers, but there were things like fresh canteens, pallets, portable heating units, fodder for the tomases and other things of that nature they'd require for an extended journey across the sands. he wasn't worried about getting lost. Vash's mental map of any inhabited place on Gunsmoke was better than most peoples printed ones; he'd lived some of his life up in Sky City, a place that had once orbited the surface of the planet with the photographic and satellite technology of the ancients at their disposal, the rest of the planet had mostly had to rely on survey teams and rough sketches at a best guess from frontiersmen. He knew where he was going. It had been a long time since he'd been there himself, but he knew where he was going.

He prayed for her safety, and knew that Milly was doing the same. After this, once he got her back safe, he was going to insist that she go home. What was between them, what had grown from friendship to a mutual attraction... it just couldn't be. Vash had thought that he might, for once in his life, get to be selfish. He'd thought that maybe it was finally his turn to have something precious of his own, something he'd always watched everyone else get to have and never been able to have for himself. He thought he'd finally get to fall in love, and be loved in return. It wasn't to be, though. Vash couldn't let her stay near him for the same reasons he couldn't let anyone else get to near him, for the exact reasons that had just happened in fact. If he let someone get close to him, Knives would use that against him. For once he'd ignored that ingrained caution and now look what had happened. If he really cared about her, he'd have sent her packing right back home when he found out she'd been reassigned back on his case on that sandsteamer. Instead, he'd let her join back up with him, let her follow him around, not just because he was tired of being alone all the time, but also because he was genuinely glad to see her and he wanted her with him. She'd stayed. Against all reason, and all sense (and for a woman like Meryl to go against good sense had to mean something), she'd stayed with him; she'd been the one to comfort and save him when he'd needed saving. Well now he was going to be the one to save her, even though he knew in the end it meant having to do the second hardest thing he'd ever done... let her go.

& & &

Knives examined the new prize he had ordered his servants to acquire for him. Not his brother's precious little human, but _another _creature altogether. Like Knives and his brother Vash this creature _looked _human, even _acted _human, but part of it was supposedly something _else_; some new kind of parasite feeding of the energies of his kin.

"You are certain that this creature is one of them?" Knives demanded of his faithful servant.

"Yes Master," Legato (in his new body) replied. "I checked its blood myself."

Knives was handed a sheaf of printouts, apparently from the med-lab computers there on board the ship. Knives examined them for a moment, calculating organic compounds and the sequences of DNA in his head, and his eyes widened at the sight of the end result... instead of _two _strands in a twisted ladder there were _three _twisted together. He looked at the unusual brainwave and brain chemistry chart read-outs and the results of the preliminary experiments done on the creature shivering in the plastic observation cage before him.

"Hmm," was all he said.

He frowned in concentration, trying to figure out wheter or not the creature would factor into his plans in the way he wanted it to.

"A slight complication, master," Legato volunteered after a moment.

"yes?" Knives said, his tone letting his servant know that he was not a man who liked complications in his plans and punishment waited in the wings for anyone who displeased him.

"The creature, though transitioned from its lowly state and into a form that is useful to the Master, has said that it is already Bonded."

Knives scowled his face darkening with rage and his being flooding at the audacity of this lowly, insignificant speck of walking pond scum; that it would _dare _to attach itself to one of his kin!

"Then we will simply find a way to undo it. My sister will not be chained to that thing for long."

Knives's scowl eased at that. It was fitting that the very kind it sought to use would in turn use it to gain their freedom.

"What is the status of the other project?" he demanded next.

It would make no point to have the creature broken to Knives' will if the reason that Knives had ordered it captured in the first place was not ready to receive it.

"The device is nearly readied to your specifications. The last of the humans you had me remove from those towns in the Southern Cornelia Region have been moved from their temporary holding pens and are in the process of being assembled to meet the fate you have designed for them Master."

Knives nodded once in grudging approval.

"However, the incompetence of this auxiliary squad knows no bounds Master, and I fear that the device that will be the first step in the Master's glorious road to victory and the eventual education of his misguided twin may be in danger of being assembled improperly. This is not an appropriate time for set-backs."

"It is never an appropriate time for set-backs," he reminded his servant. "But perhaps adequate supervision within the field is required. You shall go to the gathering place and supervise the creation of the device. I shall stay here and see to bending this creature to my will and once accomplished I shall deploy the ark to come and meet you there."

"Master," Legato bowed himself out, having gotten his marching orders.

Knives looked at the humanoid creature who once had been but no longer was entirely human. Not, thankfully a plant-human hybrid, but a twisted amalgamation meant to be comparable with the energy waves emitted by his kind. It would be a useful tool in Knives' designs for the future, one might even call it a key to unlock that which yet remained sealed away from him. All it would take would be to bring the creature into Knives' service. It _would _be done, of that Knives had no doubts; he'd had over a century of practice in the fine art of bringing the lowly lesser species to see to his way of thinking. With the right words, the right drugs, the application of the right sort of pain and pressures... The human body was such a frail thing, and the humans themselves naturally inclined to weakness. They all begged him to let it end but eventually they all became slaves to his will as he wanted it.

:_Vash moves as I will him to for as long as I hold that little human of his hostage to his good behaviour, while he is distracted by the mission I have sent him on, I shall move the last of me pices into place in order to gain eden for my sisters. It is well_.:

Knives drummed his fingers absently on a nearby surface as he regarded the transitioned humanoid with satisfaction. There were no problems, all went as he willed it to.

* * *

**More plot? What exactly are you up to Knives?**

**Remember, no matter what it looks like, it's never what it seems.**


	16. Gridlock

The air was as sickly-sweet as ever, and by the time she'd managed to slog down memory lane, Meryl was feeling positively giddy once more. She thought that, in a way, the drugs might actually have helped her a little. Aside of their soporific properties, they had also a calming effect, they numbed the pain of the hard, sad times, making the still-sharp and jagged emotions that went with them disconnected and once-removed from her.

She was exhausted. The little trip down memory lane had tired her out in ways she'd never anticipated. She'd had to use every mnemonic and memory-triggering device she could think of, from singing little nursery-rhyme songs to thinking of colors, and reciting poetry, to trigger those memories she'd spent so much time trying to bury. It had been hard, especially at first, her mind had certainly fought her on it, ten years of repression wasn't easily fought off after all.

There was something a little odd about her sudden ability to recall things now that she hadn't been able to before; it was almost like there was something or someone there, whispering softly in her ear but on a level that she could not actually hear, coaching her and encouraging her. She'd unlocked memories that she hadn't known she'd had... and that was suspicious too. How could she just forget something like that? How does one forget something they'd grown up knowing? You forgot things like your old telephone number or your street adress as you grew up, you didn't forget about things that had been an essential part of you. A chilling thought occured to her, you didn't forget things like that, unless you were helped to forget them. Somehow, she didn't think that the memories she'd just managed to recall had been forgotten all by themselves. Something had helped her bury them, and now something had helped her recall them.

Meryl tried to shrug off the creepy thoughts, the entire idea was just ridiculous. But deep deep down, she couldn't convince her soul of that.

The only way she'd gotten through the sorrow and pain of some of those memories had been through sheer stubborn willpower. She had always been stubborn, it had been that very stubborness that had enabled her to hold it together through everything that life had thrown at her. She stayed the course, held the line, didn't let go no matter what happened, once her feet were on the path she'd follow it through no matter what occured, even if it ended her life.

She'd been born early, or so she'd been told, early enough almost to be considered a miscarriage, but her father had known enough of Lost technology to have the means to save her life, although he hadn't been able to save her mothers as well. They'd lived in a small town called Stryfe, outside of the Crackback Canyons. He was a bit unusual in his teaching methods; for example, instead of regular building blocks made of wood like other children had, he'd given Meryl a special set of molecule building blocks, ones that only attracted to one another and built things when a viable combination was made. But she'd been very happy in thier little house by the canyons with him. Even when she'd been a small child, she'd gotten to go with him and other archaeologists on digs out in the deserts and places far away. He'd brought back intersting toys for her to play with. It hadn't been a perfect life, her father, due to the uncertainty of his success in any given venture hadn't been able to always give her the finer things her later guardians could, but they'd worked together to make ends meet and she'd been happy as a child.

She'd also, now that she was making an effort to remember it, been a little different from other children. She hadn't been aware of it then, but like her father before her there was something a little different about her. She could see the world like no-one else could, see down past the surface of things into the tiny parts that made up the whole. Her father had sworn her to secresy about thier family secret; they were called Resonants. Her father told her that their ancestors had had a very special destiny that had never been fulfilled, but said he'd tell her about it when she was older. Meryl remembered watching her father take energy from one of those special crystals he'd discovered on a dig and pour it through his Channels, resonate with the vibrational patterns of certain molecules and... create new things. She recalled that he'd been disappointed at his inability to take in a lot of power and do more with it, but taking in ordinary raw energy, like electrical power, stung. It was not a pleasant feeling to take it into their channels, even if they could do useful things with it, and her father had often wondered if there wasn't something wrong with them or their ancestors.

It seemed almost impossible to her now that she could forget such a basic thing, she remembered him coaching her through her own first attempts at channeling, the way he'd carefully explained how molecules worked and why certain combinations did and did not work when chaining them. She'd learned to resonate and channel the same way that other children learned to read and spell.

Her father had been special, as had his father, and his father before him. He'd exlained to her when she'd been very young that he was something called a Resonant. He believed that it had been his destiny to use his peculiar gift to make the world a better place.

Her father, being a very smart man, had created a Grid System, a kind of Resonant shorthand that eneabled them to deal with their abilities by makeing the absolute most of every spec of power they could channnel. Like a computer program used a special language of digital symbols that translated into pixels that were in turn handled by programs and routines and sub-routines, the grid system did much the same.

The grids dealt with the world on the level of the infentesimal, making tiny tiny changes, very exact changes in the state of matter to rearrange the world to thier particular desire. It could rearrange oxygen and hydrogen to make water, it could chain molecules to make other compounds using a symbolic language for matter and energy and the manipulation thereof.

There were symbols for certain molecules and symbols for certain amplitudes of enrgies, and sybols for what would be done with those energies and they were all put together, like a mathematical equation to reach a desired product. it hadn't been enough for him though, he still continued to research the project that his ancestors had supposedly been on (though Meryl had been too young to remember anything more than that).

One one fateful dig way out in the wastes, he'd discovered a peice of a file, corroded to almost complete uselessness that had told him more about his powers and thier ancestor's destiny than he'd known for himself. His knowledge of the purpose that their ancestors had been bred for was sketchy, at best; knew only that his father had told him, from the little that his father's father had peiced together and imparted to him before he'd died, and that knowledge was the incomplete gleanings from his great-great-grandfather.

From the parts of the file that Meryl's father had discovered and been able to rescue from corrosion had basically told him the reason why he couldn't handle the amounts of energy he wanted to. Her father had wanted the kind of energy that would enable him to create enough water to let an entire township survive without the need for a plant to make it for them, or to adjust the thin soil of the desert enough to support vast crops, or call down rain from the sky or make the planet teeem with life. He was taking the wrong kind of energy into his channels.

Meryl could now clearly recall his excitement, and his rushed, hurried explanaition. The human brain produced something called a Psi-wave. It was a special kind of energy-wave, like light was or like sound was, but it had special properties. A normal human mind produced only and infintesimal amount of the Psi-wave, some thing like negative one point zero to the trillionth power, which was a really small decimal in scientific notation. But some people, some very special people, produced a Psi-wave that was large enough to be measured by an electroencephalegraph monitor. These were the people with psychic gifts; telepaths, telekinetics, empaths, psychometric readers and others like them. The ones who could do a lot, produced a larger Psi-wave, but it consequently often made them menatlly unstable.

The report he had just discovered had been a secret file from old Earth about the properties of Resonants. The report, her father had told her, explained why it was that he and Meryl were not able to do as much as he innately felt he should be able to do; they were trying to channel the wrong kind of energy. The Resonants had been meant to resonate with Psi-waves, this would not only stabilize the energy output, he'd said, but also would enable them to channel vastly much more energy than he'd been able to manage so far. Furhtermore, Resonants had been made, the file had told him, to "bond" with a Psi, or rather, the person who emmited a Psi-wave.

The bonding, he'd gone on to explain to her in a rush, was a way to stabilize the Psi-output and a way to harness the energy of the Psi-wave to its fullest potential. Meryl hadn't understood then, and she wished years later that she'd never come to understand all that it entailed.

Her father, of course being the scientist that he was, had been afire to try the experiment himself. The first successful Bonding in Gunsmoke history! And together, he and his bond-partner could save the world!

Meryl, only nine at the time, hadn't really understood it, but her father was happy about something so she was happy with him. A few months later, they'd moved away from her home in the canyons to somewhere else, Meryl had been unhappy to leave her home and go to some dreary institute-town somewhere she'd never even heard of, but her father had happily promised that it was going to be the start of a new life for them. It had, just not in a good way.

He and a group of scientists interested in his proposed experiments in recreating some old project from Earth had gathered together and found a young woman who emmitted a reasonably strong Psi-wave but wasn't crazy. They'd discovered early on that opposite gender pairs were the only way the bonding would take, something about balance or something.

Her father had Bonded off to a nice young woman named Sarah.

Meryl Strfe had had the misfortune to have been born with the occasional abilities of a receptive empath, a person who could feel the emotions of other people as though they were her own. Naturally this had led to her being a very solitary child. the important thing was that no-one needed to try to explain what the Bonding was like to her, she could sense it. It was like being two halves of a whole; bondmates were not separate from each other, thier thoughts and feelings were always in sync. The others thoughts and emotions were like a constant background hum in thier minds, one that they adjusted their own behavior for without even thinking about it. This was useful when they needed to link up to do some resonant work, there was no guessing about power flows or who was going to do what when, but it had its downside. They litterally could not fight with each other, an emotional hurt to one would injure the other, it was even the same with physical injuries. They were this strange symbiotic entity that was one mind speaking with two voices. Meryl hadn't entirely been certain she'd liked it, but her papa still read to her and he was happy so she tried to be happy. The other downside was that her father became more and more wrapped up in his work and in his bonding, he never actually ignored Meryl, but she'd found it hard to adjust to this new unwanted intruder in her life.

A year and a half had passed when her father had told her that the experiments he and Sarah had been working on involving htier bonding and its applications towards saving the world were going well and they were ready to move on to the next level (Meryl hadn't been sure what the next level was). That was when disaster struck.

Something went wrong, Meryl didn't know to this day what it was, but it had resulted in the death of Sarah, her father's bondmate. That was when they had discovered that in a Bonded pair, the death of one was the death of the other. The doctors, through hard work and many frantic proceedures that young Meryl had not been privy to, had managed to save her fathers life but to this day part of her wished they hadn't, because they hadn't had to stick around to deal with the aftermath. They'd called the experiment unviable and shut down the project, sending the two of them on thier way.

"You have to be strong for your daddy," they'd told her. "He's going through a hard time right now so you need to be strong for him and help him through it." Little Meryl hadn't understood, not really. So she'd done what she knew how to do. She'd taken up the slack at home; she'd done the laundry for the two of them, and cooked thier meals and cleaned up the house. She hadn't known much about any of those things when she'd started out with it, not having a mother at home to teach her had resulted in a rather stunted education in those areas, but she'd been a smart girl and she'd learned, both from listening to the women that hung about the other students at school and from watching old vids featuring someone named "Martha Stewart". Her cooking had improved with education and practice, and she'd kept up on her studies because that was the one thing father had always asked about whenever he came out of his stupor.

She called it The Lingering, for that was what it was. He was no longer a whole man, no longer even half a man. He was a hollowed out shell, a body that could drink and sleep and feed but would always walk this world a pale shadow of its former self. He did not live, he but lingered in the land of the living, going through the motions of life but with no purpose. The death of his Bondmate had taken her father's soul with it, and all that was left was a walking corpse animated by sorrow, a slow drain of life and hapiness. It was a slow death. A death by inches.

But it had been hard to watch him, especially in those first days, and in all the days after them. His eyes, once kind and alight with laughter and intelligence, dulled over with a hollowed-out greiving that led him to the only thing that could dull the pain even a little. He'd never been a man much given to drink before, but with a sorrow that ate away at him from the inside out most couldn't really blame him for turning to the bottle for a litle relief. Meryl was there to make sure he was clean, and fed, and didn't choke on his own vomit. In those long twilight hours where he found releif in the dulling effects of drink she murmured quiet soothing words to him, words of encouragement and words of love, trying to make him see that he shouldn't give up on himself because even though his Bondmate had left him, Meryl was still there.

He did not hear her words. The dead do not hear the entreaties of the living, the only voice he could hear was the grasping, greedy voice of The Lingering. The voice that dragged him ever more steadily down and down and down. Still, Meryl had fought that voice with the only weapons she'd had to offer at the time, steady patient care and words of love. She'd moulded herself into the ideal daughter, certain that if only she were good enough, smart enough, perfect enough that her father would stay and love her. For the longest time she'd felt betrayed and resentful when he had disappeared. She'd kept up her end; her grades were impeccable, her manners above reproach, she'd seen to every detail in running thier household... what had she done wrong that he should abandon her?

But the very young are surprisingly adaptable, and having known no other life but one of a salf-reliance she'd bounced back with a resiliency that would have made any child psychologist immediately concerned had one ever been consulted regarding Meryl. Meryl had decided that her father had been dead since the day his bondmate had died and that all the time therafter had been thier period to greive together. It was at that young age that she understood something; death was not the greatest loss in life, the greatest loss was what died in you while you lived. She knew on that day that she would never, ever let someone or something become so deep a part of her life that loosing it would kill her inside. She knew too well the cost.

Meryl decided that it would be improper to greet her new guardians with tear streaks on her face so she'd put away her greif and set her best foot forward. Her stubboness in holding things together in her home stood her in good stead then, for it gave her all of the qualities that Sir and Madam, her new guardians, were looking for.

Meryl Stryfe was seen as a polite, well behaved, thankfully untroublesome girl that would tend to herself if let to her own devices. Unlike her "brother" (who was actually her cousin) Meryl was never the cause of undue worry or anxiety to her new caregivers. She was quiet, hardworking, capable and confident; everything her new guardians could possibly want in a child. And that was just the way she wanted it. The infrequent, very formal stilted letters she received from her aunt at the boarding school they sent her to in order to round out her education were full of formal recognition for her acheivements and accolades.

Meryl and her "brother" (who was actually her cousin, but brother by adoption) had a very strained relationship. For one thing, their personalities were very different; Marcus was deliberately the opposite of the studious stoic his parents wanted in a child, but was instead, loud, rebellious and more than a bit of a troublemaker. Meryl had seen it as her duty as his elder sibling to keep him out of trouble as much as possible. A task easier undertaken than acheived for he was as clever as a sandfox and very much resented Meryls butting into his fun and telling him that he should not do this or that because it would get him into trouble. He'd resented and disliked her intensly when he'd first come to live at his house, but Meryl's stubborness and tenacity had forced him to respect her. And whether the boy had known it or not, he'd provided her a much needed distraction and a means to help her forget.

She slipped out of her reveries of the past having gotten to the information in her ealiest memories that she'd been seeking. She remembered most of what she'd known then, her information was spotty and patchy in many places and often there were more questions about her and her families origins than she had answers for, but she had the information she needed to work with.

Meryl would use that grid system to get her out of there. She didn't have an outside Source... that was what a Resonant called the source of thier energy that enabled them to work thier... whatever, channels, she guessed she'd call them. She'd just have to use her own meagre supply of energy. She knew inherently that this was dangerous, if she used too much of her own internal Source, it would kill her... but certain amounts of it could be used, and then replaced later. she'd just use the smallest amount of power possible ot the best effect. Moving large things took more power than moving the very small.

She sat back against the bars of her prison to think. What would undo the lock on her cuffs and cage for the least amount of energy? 


	17. To and Fro

Vash sighed and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. He remembered again why he disliked tomases so much; they were smelly. Milly was a regular fish in water (not that he'd ever actually _seen _a fish in water before, but he supposed the holo's of them on the ship counted) out there in the desert. They were moving from oasis-town to oasis town in a general southerly direction. The going was faster than if he were trying to make the same journey on foot, but it was still going a lot slower than he'd have liked. He really missed his duster too; the material of the coat had been a special polymer that had absorbed the heat of the suns and cooled the interior lining of the coat, he'd never been so terribly hot as anyone else. He'd often wondered how short girl could stand wearing all of those layers! He knew she wore at least three not even counting the gun-cloak she wore for travel. There was the high-necked jacket with long sleeves, the office blouse she wore under it, and then the silk under slip (he'd seen hanging out on the lines) plus her bra. He was having a hard time of it with even just a simple cotton button-down and sturdy denim workers pants; cotton breathed it was true, but the heat of the two suns beating down on him were relentless and utterly without mercy.

To distract himself from the glaring heat Vash tried to figure out what his next move was going to be. He was tired of playing by Knives' rules all the time; unfortunately his twin still had a hostage, so Vash had no choice for the time being. He was less than thrilled to have Milly along, to be honest, not because he didn't want her there, heavens no, but because he worried about her safety beig so near him.

:_Then again, I'd worry about her safety if she **wasn**'t near me too_,: Vash thought wryly.

He figured that Knives wasn't above taking a second hostage if the opportunity presented itself. Maybe it was better that she was at his side where he could keep an eye out for trouble. If anything happened to Milly he was sure that Meryl wouldn't forgive him. Her protectiveness of her junior partner was legendary and she took her responisibility as Milly's senior very seriously. Vash had sometimes wondered what Wolfwood's fate would have been the next morning if he'd lived and then had to face the aftermath of that night... probably a sharp warning and an "I'll be watching you" from Meryl.

Vash hadn't the faintest idea of what Knives could possibly want him to see in this place. Possibly another empty town. Vash recalled very clearly running across the towns that had been emptied of adults in the Southern Cornelia Region... Legato had left a message to him via the children left behind "this is what happens when you wait too long." Vash was very nervous about what his brother had in store for him this time.

He cast his mind over what he knew of the place he was being sent to. Vash had never been to the town personally, though he had passed by it in his wanderings and because he was what he was Vash never forgot anything. He had perfect recall and it was sometimes a blessing but more often a curse. He could recall the faces and instances that had left every single mark on his body, and he remembered every single day he had lived of the last century as clearly as he recalled the day that had just passed. One of the things he'd come to dread recently was the thought that one day, her face would only be another memory to him. What he wouldn't give to have her stay with him forever.

Vash cut off the thought. There was no sense in wishing; if he wanted her to stay alive long enough to live out even a normal span of years, he'd start trying to figure out what Knives was up to this time.

:_Hmm... Stryfe, Stryfe_...: he muttered in his thoughts.

The title of the town was familiar to him for another reason besides the fact that it shared Short Girl's last name. Another few minutes of pondering brought the faint niggling wisp of memory to the forefront of his mind. Stryfe, at edge of the Southern Lowwastes, just off Crackback Canyon had beena town of scientists and archaeologists that had been experimenting with some new alternative form of energy; one that didn't rely on Plants.

He now remembered! He remembered what had been bothering him about it. About ten or fifteen years ago, there had been something on the Sat-feeds about the entire population of the town having gone missing! No-one knew why they had left or where they had gone; the investigation had turned up no sign of a struggle or a forced exodus, no sign of natural disaster, all the water was still there; the investigators had stated that everything was laid out in such a way as to seem like the people had just dropped whatever they were doing and disappeared. Vash had been tempted at the time to have a look himself, but he'd been clear on the other side of the Sands and something else had come along.

:_I think they said something about there being only one survivor_...: Vash frowned, trying to recall all the details.

Oh, he'd remember in time, it was just going to take just a minute. After a moment of hard thought, he had it.

:_Yes, a child. A young girl_.: The sat-feeds had called her "The Stryfe Child," in the interests of protecting her privacy, and she'd been taken in by a blood relative of hers who had come forth to claim her.

So they'd be going to another dead town, Gunsmoke was full of them, just like in the real old west for Earth. Places where people had once lived in a thriving community but then were forced to abandon their homes and livelihoods because they couldn't survive; the situation changed or (more often) the water dried up. He hated visiting them. They were always so... spooky. The wind howled in and out of dilapidated shells of buildings that were slowly being overtaken by the sands. There was sand and dust everywhere, and it was always so creepy being in a place where people should be... but where there were none. It always gave him the colleywobbles.

A weeks travel by tomas to get to the town.

* * *

Knives growled to himself as his faithful servant slathered his wounds with disinfectant and numbing salve to help take away the sting. His dear brother was going to know his displeasure for giving him these wounds. The physical throbbing ache of the wounds were nothing compared to the torment that Knives felt in his soul from his dear brother's treachery. He was _supposed _to be at Knives' side, but no, instead he was going to have to go through this all over again. When was he ever going to _learn_?!

The elder plant twin sighed and dismissed his servant with a sharp gesture. Knives appraised the new body Legato had found for himself and he smiled smugly. Not a bad fit, and it would likely prove more than useful later on, he was sure. The previous inhabitant would certainly be pissed as hell if he could see the new use it would be put to, but that thought just added an extra fillip of amusement to the situation. Knives' mood took a downturn as his thoughts traveled inevitably back to his brother and their recent encounter.

:_How could he_?!: Knives raged to himself.

He'd given his brother every opportunity to realize his mistakes and come home to the only one who could possibly understand all that he was. And Vash had wilfully turned away from him! Knives was feeling well enough to pace with frustration. How had Vash won? Sheer dumb luck, that was all... he'd all but _cheated_! What did Knives have to do to get through to him? He'd sent his brother nightmares, living incarnations of the cruelest and most vile aspects humanity had to offer, and yet Vash insisted on trying to save the worthless breed.

He saved them even as they hunted him, even as they carved away at his flesh piece by piece, even as they betrayed him time and again, even as they died on him, taking little bits of his soul with them. He believed in them, and they were slowly consuming him inch by inch.

:_Well, I suppose it's time I stopped playing nice_,: Knives frowned.

He couldn't touch his brother just yet, not and lead him down the path he wanted him to follow, but there had to be a way he could punish him for his transgressions against his own flesh and blood indirectly.

:_Flesh and blood hmm_?: Knives mused to himself, an idea forming easily into his mind.

A moment later, satisfied, he ordered one of his lesser minions, the ones traveling with the chit he'd ordered them to aquire from his brother, to see to it.

Then he sat back in the cushions of his air-conditioned sand speeder and steepled his fingers, already working out the next few steps in his strategy. It was time he stopped paying nice and just got things done. After all, it was easier to beg forgiveness than to ask permission, and once the troublesome matter of the humans was settled once and for all Vash would have to forgive his brother eventually... after all, Knives would be all he'd have left.

* * *

**See to it... that sounds ominous. **


	18. Marlon Special

Her skull throbbed abominably, a slamming pound between her temples that made her eyeballs feel like they were going to explode. At first that was the only thing she felt, then she became aware of other sensations; her throat felt dry and scratchy and she'd give just about anything for a drink of water... and her mouth felt stuffed with cotton. No. Wait. It was stuffed with cotton. Meryl worked her toungue back and forth for a minute, probably looking like a cat trying to rid itself of a hairball, and finally managed to spit the stupid thing out.

She then took a moment to try and work her thoughts around the pain to figure out why she was feeling such a headache in the first place. She'd just been making her first experiments in trying to tap into the strange gifts she'd once controlled and now just barely remembered when she'd heard footsteps at the corridor. Like a child almost caught by their parents reading under the covers after lights out, Meryl had tried to "stuff" her first tentative experiment to one side and it had gotten out of her careful control. The power had suddenly welled up, stretching like an elastic band, and then snapped back on her causing her to tumble directly into unconsciousness. It had been a bit of an advantage in one way, she hadn't needed to feign unconsciousness when the guard had come for whatever purpose he'd come for. She was fairly certain that if he'd discovered her inexplicable state of self-awareness when she was supposed to be drugged senseless by the cloud of sedatives in the air, the results probably wouldn't have been very happy for her.

Her head still felt like there was a balloon slowly expanding inside her skull and her head was trying to expand to accommodate it, but couldn't. Meryl took a few deep breaths, trying to bring the pain under control, it was just as the pain in her head was ebbing ever so slightly and she was about to turn her thoughts to figuring out what had happened to her in recent events to put her in this new state when she became aware of an odd _new _sensation. Her mind translated it as an itch, on her hand. Meryl blinked groggily and sluggishly brought her hands up to veiw in the dim light.

Wait. Hadn't her hands been tied behind her back? Her mind was distracted by that thought for a moment and she had just reached the conclusion that _yes_, yes they _had _been tied behind her back, but were now in cuffs in front of her. How had that happened? She was distracted at first by those thoughts, so her mind didn't at first comprehend exactly what she was looking at. Her hands looked familiar as ever but... there was something wrong. That itching sensation on her left hand increased and her mind abruptly told her to look away. But the drugs in her system made her movements sluggish and she stared stupidly at them, her thoughts mired in a slow haze.

Dreamily she thought to herself, '_oh don't be silly, that can't possibly be what you're looking at_' as she looked at her left hand; it didn't even hurt. Then her mind finally translated all of the information she was receiving. The itch abruptly exploded into a thobbing, burning pain and her mind realized that, yes, that was a bandaged little stump where her left pinky finger had been before she'd woken up. She whimpered in pain that seemed to only increase the longer she stared at the place where her finger was _supposed _to be.

Someone had cut off her finger.

It was, oddly enough, neatly bandaged with no sign of blood on the wrappings... but still, there was supposed to be more of it there! She wanted to scream because now that her mind had caught up to events, her wound hurt a great deal actually. So much so that she wasn't certain she could take the pain. It was excruciating and it felt like it was spreading, slithering up though her hand, throbbing around her wrist, and traveling up her arm. It was probably her mind playing tricks on her, but oh! It burned! She felt the edges of her vision beginning to grey out and she was about to surrender herself to unconsciousness to escape the pain but something inside her wouldn't allow her to.

Her stubborn streak once again reared its head. Someone had injured her, likely the same person who had captured her. Someone had cut off her finger and expected that she was going to lie there like a good little captive and let them do as they wanted with her. They probably figured on harvesting more of her body parts periodically to use them for... whatever it was they were using them for; ransom or something like it probably. That was the only reason she could think of that they'd take something like her little finger and not just kill her or take something more important. A spark of anger and outraged indignation sparked in her and Meryl carefully fed the spark; the anger was making it easier to clear her head so she could think and it was also giving her a little courage; and in this situation she needed every little bit she could come up with. Now if that anger didn't get out of hand and make her act stupidly, she should be okay.

She started out by doing what she usually did in situations like these, forcing herself not to panic; to think and figure things out. So then, what was the last thing she remembered?

& & &

"I dunno, what do _you _think Mister Vash?" Mily asked, already holding the duster up to his breast to compare the fit.

It was nothing like his old duster, being brown, plain and not tailored to fit him. There were no buckles to secure the flaps closed and keep out the wind, no collar for him to duck his head partly into to either hide his expression or help filter out the sand from the wind. He didn't even have a gun, and if he were going to be facing his brothers assassins again, he was going to need one.

"Hm, too small," Milly mumbled, looking at Vash as compared to the duster she'd picked out of the small general store in that town. She continued rummaging through the wares for something to suit.

"I guess it'll fit me," she said optimistically. "But I keep forgetting how _tall _you really are, I don't know if I'm going to find something here to fit you."

They were resupplying for the trip. Milly had already done the shopping for travel food, tomas fodder, water canteens and jugs, as well as a small storm tent and now she was looking for the gear she was accustomed to having like a travel duster and a stun-gun.

She fished through the racks at the back of the store, looking for a flak jacket for him.

"Try this one," she said handing him a long dun-colored duster. Her expression was more one of optimism than that she actually thought it would fit. Vash tried to stick an arm in one sleeve...

"No dice," he said a moment later.

The sleeve was four inches too short for him and there was no _way _the coat was fitting across his shoulders. Sometimes, having such broad shoulders was a real disadvantage.

"That was the biggest one I could find," she said in discouragement.

"Ah've got sumthin' new in Missy," the elderly store owner said, apparently always on the lookout for a bargain. "Ah cain't seem to find a buyer for it, with it being such a loud color an' all. Mos' people lookin' ta buy a duster're lookin' fer sumthin' a little more subtle-like."

"Oh?" Milly said curiously. "And you think it'll fit?"

"Cain't hurt ta try it," the man said, rummaging behind the counter. With a noise of triumph he shook something out and spread it across the top of his counter with a proud look. Vash made a little noise when he saw it, halfway between disgust and exasperation.

"Like a bad penny," he muttered. Milly grinned over at him.

"At least we know it fits," she replied.

He sighed, but had to acknowledge that she had a good point there.

"How much do you want for it?" Vash asked.

The vendor, smelling money to be made, named an outrageous sum. Vash had been around Meryl long enough to know that if he spent that much on one coat, no matter how dear to him, she'd wallop him a good one as soon as she heard about it. And Milly would tell her too. Insurance Girls gossiped about everything. So he started begging, pleading and cajoling the vendor down to something a little more reasonable. Finally he had to resort to the sad tale of Meryl's kidnapping (with a few judicious edits here and there) and eventually the vendor was talked into giving him the coat at a generous discount.

"We're going to have to find someone to fix the sleeve," he muttered. "I should have gotten more of a discount for that."

"What's that sonny?" The vendor asked cutting a sharp look over at him like he was any ordinary young man making sarcastic remarks about the service.

"I just said that I was wondering where you found that?" Vash lied glibly.

"Oh, some feller passin' through town a week or so back. The poor bloke practically forced me to take it off his hands," the vendor said, beaming in amusement. "He said sumthin' 'bout it bein' cursed or somethin' on account a' how everyone kept mistakin' him fer bein' Vash the Stamede."

"Hm..." Vash said, looking long and consideringly at it. "Maybe it's the coat after all."

Milly laughed a little at that as they paid for the items they'd purchased. He regarded the red coat slung over his arm a little dubiously. He wasn't sure he _wanted _to put it back on. Still, he sort of believed that sometimes things happened for a reason, and this coat turning up way out here couldn't have just been a coincidence. For a breif flash of a fearful moment he thought that Knives might be behind his sudden aqquisition of his most reknowned garment, but realized that the idea was unlikely... if Knives had been behind it, the whole ordeal would have been a lot more painful.

:_He always did like to take the more devious route in reminding me of what I really am_,: Vash thought darkly. And Knives wouldn't be apologizing for it any time soon either it appeared.

"Shall we get started then?" Milly said packing their gear onto the tomases and the one pack-tomas she'd insisted that they get... after all, she'd reasoned, when they finally got Meryl back sempai would want her own tomas to ride wouldn't she? He just loved how Milly didn't doubt for an instant that they were going to find her friend and rescue her from durance vile.

It was with a heart heavy with reluctance that he led Milly to their final stop before leaving town. He'd seen a tiny shop with a wooden sign hanging from the eaves of the roof in the shape of a gun advertising that quality weapons were sold there. He sighed a little, there was no help for it; if they were going to rescue Meryl they were going to have to have weapons to do so. Not to mention everything that his brother was probably about to throw at him.

Vash again cursed himself for his naivete in underestimating his brother once again. This is what he got for trying to have a little faith in Knives' innate goodness, maybe it was time he learned that Knives _had _no innate goodness. Maybe all those high minded ideals he was always spouting off about were nothing more than excuses, a thin veneer of idealism to hide the fact that he just wanted to punish his brother, to make him suffer for not doing everything Knives' way.

He shook his head to clear it of the unusually pessimistic turn his thoughts had taken. Now was not the time to brood, he had a girl to rescue; he'd think about paying his brother back for making him worry like this later. Meryl was never far from his thoughts; where-ever she was, he hoped that she was okay. He only had the hope that she was too valuable to him as a hostage for Knives to harm her in any way, and considering the fact that he couldn't figure his brother out at the best of times, that was an awfully fragile hope. Vash sighed and pushed his way in through the swinging double doors of the little weapons shop.

"Yo!" a cheery voice called from behind the counter. Vash was shocked to recognize it a moment later. He never forgot a face, after all.

"Frank Marlon?!" he said in surprise.

"Wellllll, blow up my guns and call me a pacifist!" he said grinning over at him. "If it isn't Vash the Stampede!"

"Mister Marlon!" Milly said, sounding equally surprised. "What are you doing here? I thought you had a shop back in that town you helped save."

"As to that," he said sheepishly scratching the back of his head. "I thought I'd start over, y'know. Sometimes old habits are easy to fall back on, and I was already well-established there, so I thought I'd get a fresh challenge; a brand new start. So I came out here, set up shop, and here I am."

He was looking better actually, his eyes weren't bloodshot anymore and he'd lost that sleepy-eyed always-half-drunk look to him. His clothes were a little less rumpled than they had been and it actually looked like his hair had seen the good side of a comb in the last few days.

"So, is this a social call or are you looking to repair that rusty old piece of junk?" he asked, his voice partly teasing.

"Actually," Vash said, scratching the back of her head a little. "I threw it into the sands. I'd kinda planned on renouncing my past, but... well, something came up."

Both eyebrows raised in surprise but Frank only said

"Sounds like you're in need of a new one then. Well, you've come to the right place. This is the only place I know where you can get your hands on a Frank Marlon Special."

"I was hoping you'd say that," Vash said trying to sound cheerful about it.

"Let me see what I can't find for you," he said. "Here put your gun hand out on the counter..."

A little mystified, Vash did as he was told. Frank Marlon took a good long look at it and rattled off something about the size and shape of his palm, how long his fingers were and some other measurements. He next gave Vash one of those two-handles-on-a-spring devices that were made to improve grip and told him to squeeze it as hard as he could. Vash handed him back a device that's handles would not spring back separate again. Frank stared at it in shock and Vash looked sheepish again, scratched the back of his head and said

"Eh-heh, guess I don't know my own strength sometimes." Frank blinked and smiled

"Guess not. Here try the weight on this one and tell me what you think." Vash was handed a larger than average revolver with a long sight on it.

"The balance is off," Vash said immediately on picking it up. Frank nodded indicating that he knew that but Vash was to proceed.

He pointed it at a nearby practice target to get a feel for it and frowned.

"It's a little heavy for its size, what's it made of?"

"Carbonized adamant," he said. "God himself couldn't melt that thing."

Vash started a little in shock. Aside of the "extra component" that Knives had added on to their twin longcolts, the guns had been made of the same material. He settled his weight and squeezed off a round. The recoil was a little surprising; not as great as the one on his own longcolt, but not bad either. The bullet ripped off the top of he target, the proposed entry and exit wounds for the revolver were a little larger than he was looking for.

"I dunno," he said dubiously, looking at the gun. "I'm not really interested in blowing people to pieces, y'know?"

"That's what I figured," Frank said, nodding to himself. "So then that's why I made... this."

From behind his back he pulled out a case with a gun in it. It was silver, but it wasn't an exact replica of Vash's famous longcolt (he found himself both relieved and surprisingly disappointed). The barrel was shorter and the trigger was just a little higher than it had been on Vash's old gun these and other minor things like weight, balance and dimensions made the gun feel like an alien stranger in his hand... but it was certainly better than nothing, and better than anything he'd find anywhere else. Vash experimentally squeezed off another round into another nearby target and saw a neat bullet hole go thought the stiff padded leather, out the other side and through the opposite wall. The recoil on it was surprisingly impressive.

"Thanks," Vash said, smiling approvingly at his new partner. "I'll take this one. And Milly here's looking for a nice stun-gun."

"I don't have anything like that behemoth you usually carry around," Frank teased her a little. "But I think I have something that should about do the trick."

He walked out from behind the counter and pulled out a rifle-sized gun that at first glance, looked ordinary enough, but when Vash looked at it again he noticed that under the thin veneer of ordinary wood and steel were parts that were made of old-earth style polymers; carbonized steel, fiberglass and the like.

"This here takes special ammunition," Frank explained showing her how the the Plasma-caps fit into the chamber and were loaded with a soft, distinctive quasi-hissing sound. He fired off into a nearby target with a small blast of light energy the air around the barrel of the gun warped from he heat of the plasma emission, but the target was only slightly singed.

"This'll take down a man Vash's size without any trouble at all," Frank promised her. "I based it off the old style stunner weaons from old earth."

Milly blinked and smiled at him while Vash tried not to look amazed, Frank really was a weapons expert! They quickly settled on a price for weapons and ammunition and Frank wished them both luck and told them to stop by again if they ever needed maintenance, mumbling something about another two of his children going out into the world as soon as Milly and he were conceivably out of earshot; Vash assumed Frank meant his weapons and not the two of them.

It was nearly sundown when Vash and Milly exited the weapons shop, and the third moon was already in the sky, pale white against the darkening blue. It would be a good night to get started. It was easier to travel by night than it was to travel by day; it wasn't as hot for one thing (though it could get damnably cold out there on the dunes) and they had the stars to guide them for another thing. The two of them mounted up and Vash pointed his beast in the direction that led down into the lowastes and on to Crackback Canyon and the small town of Stryfe.

He sighed a little as they set out... he prayed that Meryl was safe and unharmed.

With a movement so habitual it was almost unconscious, Vash reached into the collar of his shirt and pulled out the little stone necklace Meryl had given him for safekeeping back in the caves near LR. It had become sort of a charm for him, to guard her safety. He had to return it to her, which meant that they were going to be reunited in order for him to do so, so neither of them were going to die until it was done. She had to be okay, she just _had _to be.

He rubbed one smooth, cool side of it with his thumb and was rewarded by the unnatural soft vibrating hum from the stone that it put out. He decided he was going to take that as a good sign and stowed the necklace away in his shirt again where it thrummed like a silent promise. She was going to be just fine. She had to be.

* * *

**Reviews are love... love me?**


	19. Ghost Town

Thier two tomases crested a dune as the suns started coming up over the horizon to a herald of brilliant pinks and oranges. Milly squinted against the watery desert-haze, the horizon shimmering and seeming to paint a picture of a small town in the air over the sands before clearing itself and revealing a tiny ant-colony of low buildings the same washed-out dun color of the desert crouched at the base of a large volcanic neck jutting up towards the sky and flattening off into a large table-top mesa with small slopes of skree at its base.

There was a small sign hanging off one distance away that was so wethered and faded that it was almost completely illegible, advertising that the town was named Styfe.

"It looks like we're here," Milly remarked mildly. Vash didn't say anything, but just kneed his tomas gently down the sloping dune towards their destination. Milly followed, looking hopefully about for some sign of life. There were none. They passed between the two posts and the sign with the towns name on it hanging by a nail from the right hand post, creaking softly in the wind and moved into the town proper.

Like most towns in the outlands it had its mainstreet directly down the center from the sign posted at the edge. Looking from side to side she could see clearly what had once been a saloon, a general store, a saddlery and blacksmith shop, a weapons supply store, a grocer, a post and sat-graph office and lastly a clothing store. The town well was at the center of the town under what had once probably been an awning but was now little more than weathered bits of plas-wood with faded shredded peices of canvas flapping in the breeze.

The wind blew dust and some few bits of desert bracken in between the buildings. It was creepy to see a place so abandoned, but it wasn't exactly an unfamiliar sight to him, he'd seen other towns similarly abandoned, and not by his brother's henchmen either; sometimes the water simply dried up, and with no plant to support them, the people were forced to move elsewhere. Still, he could tell by Milly's anxious face and the hunched position her shoulders were taking that she found it more than a little unsettling. He shared her sentiments on the matter; the place was creepy. It was weird being in a place that looked like it should have people in it, and there were _no people_.

"What do you think he wants us to find?" she asked in a small quiet voice as they led their tomases up to the town well to get them a drink.

"I don't know," he said honestly. "This place has been abandoned for longer than he's been aware, at least to my knowledge, so whatever happened here might not actually have been by his hand."

"It hard to know where to start looking when you don't know what you're looking for," Milly remarked as she pulled a bucket of water up from the well and gave her tomas a drink. Vash sat at the edge of the well, waiting his turn to water his beast and toed about in the sand. His gaze narrowed suddenly and he cocked his head to one side. The sand looked like ordinary sand for the most part, a tiny-grain-sized mixture of different rock detritus, but... it looked _sparklier _than usual. Was it gold dust perhaps? He toed loose some more and scooped up a handful to inspect more closely.

Vash's senses were keener than an average humans and when he wanted to he could "zoom in" on something and examine it more closely than the eyes of a normal human could ever hope to manage. He did so now. At first glance he didn't find anything terribly different about the sand; the usual mix of granites, basalts, lesser igneous and some metamorphic and sedimentary detritus blown in on the winds from who knew where. There was no gold dust, but there was _something_... Vash carefully fingered through the detritus, isolating the unusal grains of sand he noticed.

"Huh," he muttered examining his findings.

"What did you find Mister Vash?" Milly asked curiously.

"Crystals," he said, pulling a small shard out from the grains of sand.

It was less than a centimeter in hieght, long and narrow, larger than a grain of sand but smaller than a pebble. Vash could tell by the shape of it that it had been once part of large peice, and that it had not fallen off by natural means, it wasn't the oyster-shell shape of a concoidial fracture, nor had it been struck off. A shape like that usually came from shattering or an explosion.

"Crystals?" questioned Milly as Vash continued to examine it, trying to determine what kind of stone it might have come from.

It wasn't anything he recognized immediately; even the tiny shard had a strange opalescent quality to it the insides lit with an inner green, blue and purple fire as the light played against it.

What he didn't tell Milly was that ever since they'd gotten near the edge of the town his arm, his _real _arm, had been acting strangely. It was sort of like a muscle tick. When he visited geo-plants in other cities, he could always tell what plant they came from, he could even get a sense of the plant herself, what sort of mood she was in (insofar as Vash could comprehend thier moods) and what her vitality level was. It was part of what he _was_; being a Plant, a living gateway for energy, made him sensitive to energy signatures. Ever since they'd entered this town Vash had been picking up on something, the problem was he didn't know what it was. It wasn't something he'd ever encountered before and that worried him a bit.

"We should start looking around," Vash decided out loud. "He sent us here to find something, so we should start looking. The sooner we find it, the sooner we can get Meryl back."

"Right!" she agreed. "Where should we start looking?"

"Try all the important-looking buildings first," he said. "If he decided to leave a message, it'll probably be right out in plain view."

Vash took the saloon, partly in hopes of finding a drink. When he walked into the building and took a look around, he realized that it was a vain hope; after being so long abandoned the saloon was dried up. There was nothing but a dark sticky residue on the bottom of the bottles, even the ones that probably weren't originally open had been knocked over by invading wildlife and spilled. The floor and bar had been covered by a thick layer of dust and sand that had blown in over the years. There was no promising sign of anything remotely like what Knives might be interested in showing him.

:_I don't even have any idea of what you might be interested in showing me here Knives_,: Vash thought in an internal ramble at the most irritating source of all of his troubles.

After all, aside of the fact that it didn't have any people in it, Vash couldn't see what the small town of stryfe, located out int he middle of no-where, had to do with the evils of humanity and thier right to live or die.

Despite the passing of time the interior of the saloon was... eerie. Under the thick layer of dust and sand and the tables and chairs that had been toppled over by wind or animals there were signs that the disappearance of the town hadn't been a forced one. There were no signs of struggle, none of the hallmarks of a slaver caravan rolling through and rounding up everyone in the town to sell off somewhere else. It was like the people that had been there had suddenly of their own accord simply got up and walked off. There were trays and plates with the dried out dust-covered remains of food left out on the counter-top (what the insects and animals had left behind anyway) and even a glass here or there that wouldn't have been there if the leave-taking had been forced. It was like they'd expected to come back, as though they'd planned on leaving their seats for only a moment and then never returned.

:_Maybe it's Knives after all_,: Vash thought in mystification. It had all the usual trademarks of a town visited by Legato and emptied out by him. He'd certainly done it before. Perhaps this time he'd decided not to leave anyone, even children, behind.

:_It can't be his doing_,: Vash argued with himself a moment later, after inspecting the bar a little more closely and finind nothing of any immediate usefulness, and no clue to the mystery that Knives had sent him to unravel.

:_This place was cleared out over a decade ago_.:

He paused to reconsider. Vash didn't know how long ago Knives had acquired Legato as a servant. It could very well have been his doing. If that was the case then Knives had been putting his pieces into place for far longer than Vash had thought. How long would it have taken him to assemble and train the Gung-Ho Guns anyway? He cast his mind back to his first encounter with one of the Guns, Monev the Gale. How long had he said he'd been training to meet with him? Was it five years? or more?

Vash hummed to himself, doing a little mental arithmetic and decided that it wasn't outside the realm of possibility that this town could _possibly _have been Knives' doing.

:_If it was Knives..._: Vash thought. :_Then what was the purpose behind it? And why does he want me to see it now_?:

There was a purpose, of that Vash had no doubts; Knives might be a psychotic little sociopath, but he was a _smart _psychotic little sociopath. He had his reasons for everything he did. But why would he send Vash here now, after all of this time?

Vash continued to worry away at the problem in the corner of his thoughts even as he walked out of the saloon and over into the next building. It was the same story there, aside of the mess made by wind and time there were no real helpful clues as to what his dear brother wanted him to see. So he could clear out a whole town, big deal, Vash already knew that about him. What was Knives trying to get him to see?

The whole place was making him uneasy, and it wasn't just the fact that it was plain creepy either. There was a strange sort of power in the place, something that hummed just below his ability to actively sense. He remembered the time in Little Arcadia where he Milly and Meryl had been invited to protect that old couple's little patch of green heaven, he'd planted a palm on the ground and had been able to sense the nearby plant that had changed the nature of the soil in that place to be able to support life. She'd bee a long way off but he'd still been able to sense her, or at least sense her nature. Vash and Knives, it seemed, would always be able to recognize their kin. The problem he was having with this place was that the power signature he was picking up wasn't one that he recognized. It didn't feel like a Plant at all, and that puzzled him.

Vash circled two more buildings, looking for clues but came up blank. He shook his head and was about to go on to look at some of the private homes (despite the creep-factor in invading the personal spaces that peolpe had left behind) when his arm twitched again. Vash frowned, turning back to the place where it had happened. His arm twitched again, like a strange sort of muscle spasm.

There was a soft humming coming from under his shirt, mystified, Vash unbuttoned the top two buttons to see the pendant Meryl had given him was... glowing. It was glowing noticeably, with a soft throbbing hum that dimmed and flared steadily, like a heartbeat. Misty tendrils of opalescent light danced and coiled within it, plasma clouds of multi-hued splendor shifting and weaving just under the surface of the stone. Vash blinked, more than a little surprised at such a discovery. He unhooked the necklace and held it up before him, dangling from the end of its delicate golden chain. It swung before his eyes a moment, and he was even more surprised to note that when it swung in a particular direction, it suddenly flared with light, throbbing softly along his senses. Curious, he stirred it into motion again, watching it swing in a circle this time. It only throbbed in one particular direction.

:_South-west. Towards the canyons_,: he thought, looking back over his shoulder in the direction that the pendant had seemed to indicate.

It was another mystery. Maybe they were connected. But Knives would not have known that he would have this special stone around his neck, and Vash suddenly got that in-over-his-head feeling again. There was definitely more going on here than he knew about and Vash hated the feeling of being the one with more questions than answers. He was accustomed to being the mystery rather than having the mystery happen to him. Knives always did seem to like turning his world on its ear.

:_And I still don't know what Knives wants me to see_,: he thought to himself.

"Mister Vash!" Milly called from the threshold of one of the buildings. "Mister Vash! I've found something!"

Vash decided that the mystery of the pendant and its seeming attraction to the canyons would have to wait until he'd gotten Meryl back safe and sound. he could ask her about it later, provided, of course that she actually knew anything; Meryl hadn't seemed to think anything of the stone other than that it was a special gift from her father. He headed over in the direction Milly had called from on the double.

Vash was caught off-guard by a sudden strange itching and burning sensation from his arm, a painful sort of tingle, the kind you got when you'd slept on a limb for the entire night and then moved and your body was at last able to restore circulation. it got worse the closer he got to the direction Milly had called from. He picked up his pace, worried that she'd stumbled onto trouble again.

It was a grave. A long, rectangular patch of earth was surrounded by a short wrought-iron fence and a large flat slab jutted neatly up out of the ground at the head of it. The odd thing about the tomb was that the headstone wasn't the usual makeshift cross to mark the grave and there were no engravings or markings on the stone at all. Vash was mystified for a moment, until he approached it. The necklace he wore around his neck that his insurance girl had given him for safekeeping suddenly started to vibrate strongly against his chest. It warmed up until the temperature reached to the point where it was uncomfortable, and it let out a small, slight high-pitched humming noise that Vash was certain only he, with his sensitive hearing, could hear.

The head-stone, which until that moment had been nothing more than a non-descript stone slab, suddenly hummed softly in resonance to the stone around his neck. Then it shimmered on the surface like heat-haze over the desert, and it cleared and glowed into a pearlescent cloudy white. A holographic image of a man appeared in it. He was an older man perhaps in his mid-to-late-forties, average height, medium build, but his thick hair was cloud-white and his eyes... Vash had never seen anything like them. Instead of being blue or brown or even grey, which would have made sense, they were an unbelievable silver. It was like someone had taken the purest sterling silver, the kind that shines white in the light, and had poured it into his eyes. They shone back the light like mirrors. It was unsettling to look at. But even more unsettling was the fact that he looked very familiar; there was something about the shape of the eyes and the set of the chin that Vash knew that he knew from somewhere.

"To my everlasting regret," the image said in a solemn, grave voice. "And so that the mistake I have made here may never be repeated, I commit my tale and my memory to this monument so that others who would follow in my footsteps will know the folly my pride has made."

Vash and Milly exchanged a long look. The man continued to speak.

* * *

**Ooh!Ooh! Here it is, here it is! I'm so excited! We reach the part where the peices slowly begin to fall into place. Please reveiw and let me know what you think. (P.S. I meant to update yesterday but I found and unplumbed cache of Renji/Rukia fics for Bleach suddenly and... well... that seemed more fun right then than posting).**


	20. Cry With the Saints

Meryl started nudging the woman through the bars of their cages, her hands and writsts were small enough that she could reach through.

"Hey!" she hissed quietly and nudged her, trying to bring her into consciousness. "Hey! C'mon, wake up!"

The woman let out a small soft groaning noise and tried to curl away from her. Meryl reached over farther and nudged her again, shaking her this time.

"Come on, wake up!" Meryl hissed again. "We don't have time to fool around."

The other woman wriggled and took a deep breath, apparently at last coming into wakefulness.

"Huh? Wha?" she asked, her voice heavy with sleep.

Meryl took that moment to get a closer look at her fellow captive. She was taller than Meryl (not a whole lot of women out there who weren't) with long dark hair down past her waist. Aside of Milly, not a whole lot of women wore their hair long anymore; it was too hot in the desert; that thick ebony mass had to be absolutely stifling in the heat of day. Her eyes were the brown of milk chocolate, or fine mahoghany tables. She had strong delicate hands, and Meryl noted that they had no calusses on them, so whatever she did there was no hard labor involved. Her face was oval-shaped, with high cheekbones and an stubborn jaw. Meryl cocked her head to one side, wondering if she should trust her impressions but, her first impression of the woman in the next cage over was that she was... kind. there was a sweetness and innosence to her that most people, aside of Milly and perhaps Vash, on this world didn't have. Gunsmoke was a hard world to live on, it was a struggle just to survive and there were so many dangers and so many differnt ways to die that most people developed a hard outer shell pretty quickly. But this woman seemed so... open, so caring. Maybe she'd been living under a rock all this time and didn't realize how hard the world was and how hard it could make people.

"You're a captive on board some kind of transport," Meryl said, trying to bring her up to speed as quickly as possible so that they could get on with the escaping.

"I don't--" she started, her face reflecting nothing but confusion. Meryl tried a different tactic.

"What's the last thing you remember?" she asked, trying not to sound impatient. They really didn't have a whole lot of time, and there was no telling when someone would come by to check on them, though with Meryls new sensitivity she'd at least sense them coming.

"I- I was..." she hesitated. "I was reading over some recent results from an experiment I'm invoved in." This she said cautiously, like there was a lot more to it than that but she was wary about discussing it with a stranger. Wel, fine, meryl didn't actually care about it any way.

"And I heard the sound of shouts and explosions nearby. I had just turned to see what was going on when there was the sound of movement nearby, the door crashed in and... and I woke up here."

"Sounds like you got raided," Meryl said, nodding her head. Probably slavers looking for new merchandize...

:_Nah, that can't be it_,: Meryl thought in mystification. :_Otherwise, why would she be here with me? I doubt very much that Knives has suddenly gotten interested in aqquring slaves, he'd just simply kill them all._:

But then again, he'd had those Gung-Ho guys so it wasn't outside of the realm of possibility.

:_It doesn't matter_,: she snapped at herself. :_The only important thing right now is to get the hell out of here_.:

"I'm Meryl," she said, offering her hand to shake.

"R-Remembrance," the young woman replied unsteadily, taking her hand loosely.

"Good to meet you. Now."

Meryl looked around her trying again to get a feel for things. She still had her spelunking equipment on her with most of the ropes and her pack piled up very sloppily in a nearby corner (causing her estimation of the kidnappers competence to fall significantly; but so much the better for them), and there was a window nearby, the cage was unlocked. Time for a little recon.

"We're getting out of here," meryl said firmly, leaving no room for doubt. The projection of absolute confidence, she had found, was a good way to give people courage and boost morale in a situation like this. She hadn't made it to Class A-1 Distaster Investigator without learning a few tricks.

"Um. How?" Remembrance asked.

"I'm going to take a look around and see where we are," Meryl said pulling out the padlock and pushing open the door to her cage.

"What if you get caught?" Remembrance asked worriedly.

"I'll just have to be careful."

Meryl didn't state that she was more than capable of improvising. She felt that that went without saying. besides, she sort of had a secret weapon if she could figure out a way to use it offensively. she went over to the window and looked out first glancing down the side of the transport to get a better idea of what she was dealing with. They were traveling in a miniaturized version of a sand-steamer, one that wasn't designed for massive transport but to only transport a few people or supplies at a time; there were probably only two or three other cars on it beside the one she and Miss Remembrance were in. Meryl couldn't imagine how useful having such a small transport might be, it seemed like a waste of resources to her but... there was just no understanding the mind of a madman she supposed. There was a good side to it though, if the transport was so small, that meant that the guards were probably minimal.

She didn't know if the suns were going up or coming down as it was about mid-day right then, but as she looked at the landscape, Meryl wasn't certain wether to be pleased or dismayed. The sandsteamer was traveling along the edge between two continental plates. There was a cliff with a sheer drop down what looked like iles but was probably really only about fifty meters that led down into a vast twisted maze of sharp, jagged basalt rock. When she crossed the room and quietly looked out the window on the left side of theri transport to see which would be better to escape from all she saw was nothing but a vast endless sea of dunes streching on to the horizon. She weighed her options, left or right, and relized that it really wasn't much of a choice at all... if they tried the dunes it was either certain death or certain recapture; there was no cover, it was easy to track them through the sands and they had no resources to make even a small trek through the dune-sea. not that the basalt-flats were a whole lot better, but at least there, unless their captors had scent hounds on them, the bare rock would leave no trace of their passing. In the twisted maze of basalt formations there were plenty of places to hide. There was even the chance they might get lucky and come across a spring, bed rock often had the occasional access to Gunsmokes water table. In short they might actually survive it.

Meryl looked around the cabin, it had been stripped bare except where the cages were bolted to the floor; the occasional strip of faux-wood (made of plastic or fiberglass) panelling that told her this had originally been built as a pleasure vehicle clung tenaciously to the wall in spots an meryl toyed with a strip, pulling it back and watching it snap back against the wall while she thought. She looked at the tangle that the captors had made of her equipment, her neatly coiled and twisted ropes had been turned to a spaghetti plate of knots and snarls, but it appeared to be mostly there; even the pitons in the bottom of the bag. Meryls estimation of her captors dropped severely; those things could easily be used as weapons, so the people who had taken her were relying entirely on the drugs to keep them meek and pliant. Amateurs. Meryl's threshold for suppressive drugs was higher than most people because of her having taken sleepers for a good portion of her life so she had a sort of natural immunity to the drugs anyway; they should have at least posted one guard outside the door or had a video camera installed or something.

She pulled over her pack they had left lying on the floor nearby and searched it, taking inventory. She was surprised by how relieved she felt when she discovered her back-up utility knife she'd had hidden in the undersleeve of her pack. She used this to turn a length of chain into a weapon and turned to her fellow captive.

"I'm sorry, I should have asked, do you want one too?" Meryl inquired. Remembrance looked back at her, seemingly slightly affronted.

"No! Thank-you. I'm a pacifist, carrying weapons is against my belief system," she said properly.

Meryl looked back at her, unable to keep the incredulousness from her face. She didn't carry weapons? How in the world did she not carry weapons? Was she serious? Meryl snorted and said

"Even the pacifists carry weapons on this world, believe me. What? Have you been hiding under a rock for the last hundred years?"

"I believe," she said, her face shining with the light and purity of a religious fanatic. "That with enough communication, peoples hearts can always understand each other."

Her hands were clasped in front of her but her face was tipped to some bright shining world that only she could see. She seemed almost incandescent, lit from within by the same purity and intensity of purpose that Meryl had seen on church depictions of plaster saints.

:_And in the words of T.S. Eliott, "Saint and Martyr rule from the tomb"_.: Meryl thought with heavy irony.

She, personally, would really rather be less saintlike and live a little longer. Meryl sighed a little to herself, this women, she could tell, was going to be nothing but trouble.

"Well I hope that works out for you. If you like, I'll just hand you over to these guys who have kidnapped us for whatever reason and you can talk them into letting us go."

"Funny," she grumbled. "And if you're planning an escape I think you should know that there's one other captive, an important one and we can't leave without her. She was the whole reason I was kidnapped in the first place."

:Great, something else to load onto my plate,: Meryl thought. She sighed a little to herself, accepting it, and continued on her project.

"Well she's not in here with us, do you have any idea where they might have put her?" Meryl asked.

"I don't know," Remembrance said forlornly. "In fact, I don't know if she's on the same transport as we are. I don't know why they took me either, I'm just a scientist. I don't even know who took me."

"As to that," she said reluctantly, deciding immediately that she wasn't going to name names.

Most people who didn't actually know him would probably hear the name Vash the Stampede and assume the worst of him instead of seeing him as either the hero or the victim of the situation, and he'd told Meryl about the situation between him and his brother in confidence so she couldn't rightly go into the details. That was his story to tell to whom he would, not hers, and she'd always prided herself on her discretion.

"I can't really say precisely who took us, or why they took you," Meryl said carefully. "But I do know that the one ultimately in charge of the opperation is no friend to us. In fact, from what I've heard he'd probably kill us sooner than look at us, so it would be in our better interests to get out of here befre he has the chance to do so."

Meryl finished off by sharpening the tips of the arrows and testing the pull on the bow, satisfied that she was not going to have to reconoiter unarmed she made my way towards the door.

"Oh um, before you go," Remembrance called softly. "Do you think you could let me out of the cage first."

The insurance-girl turned escapee blinked realizing that she'd forgotten she was actually still in there and then felt chagrined at herself.

"Oh, sorry," she said sheepishly. She discovered that once she already knew what a grid "felt" like after she'd made it once it was much easier and faster to make one again. A moment later and she had the chains and the padlock snapped off and the other woman was able to get out and stand up.

Of _course _she was taller than Meryl.

_I'll just think of her as a replacement Milly_, Meryl thought to herself, trying to find the best in the situation. No-one could replace Milly, but the new girl would have to do until Meryl could get back to her friend and partner. She only hoped that Milly and Vash unsupervised didn't spell disaster for some poor unsuspecting town out in the middle of no-where.

"Well, we're not getting any safer," Meryl said resignedly. "Let's go."

* * *

**I'm sorry I haven't posted, don't worry there's still plenty more to go, but I've been sucked into the Final Fantasy void again. I just got my brand-spanking-new PS3 and final Fantasy 13 game to go with it. So If you don't hear from me thursady saend me an email that says "Hey, woman! Get yur lazy butt off the game and get posting!" ^_^ I hope you liked the chapter!**


	21. The Stryfe Incident

"Mister Vash?" Milly questioned as the flickering image paused, apparently cycling through its programming.

"Hm?" he replied, denoting that he was curious to hear her observation.

"Don't you think he looks a little like _Sempai_?"

Vash frowned as he scrutinized the image, and realized with a start that Milly was onto something (as usual). It wasn't immediately noticeable, but there was something around the shape of his eyes and the slight wave in his hair that did indeed remind him strongly of Meryl, if thse features were made more masculine.

"Think they're related?" he noted back to her.

"I dunno," Milly said. "Sempai doesn't talk much about her family, only that it's a little troublesome to keep in touch with them like I do."

"Hey, I think it's going to say something else."

"I am Michael Stryfe, and this is my story," the image said gravely.

Milly and Vash exchanged another look, the names couldn't just be a coincidence.

"My ancestry is a puzzle that I don't have all of the peices to, nevertheless I've always strove to understand the purpose that my kind were born into this world for. Myself, my father, my father's father, and his father before him, and his before him, all the way back to the original inhabitants of Project SEEDs were born with a very unique and special gift, and with it a very important duty. I was born Human, and upon the threshold of adolescense I became something... other."

The image of the man telling his story faded and was replaced by an image of an ordinary strand of dioxiribonucleic Acid, or DNA, twirling slowly like a twisted ladder. Suddenly, the usual double-helix he was accustomed to seeing was joined by another strand. The genome bonds unzipped and reformed onto the new half-strand, creating a triple-helix.

"In my blood, and in my fathers blood lies a latent strand of synthetic DNA, it is not an organic compound, but rather it appears to be some sort of... man-made compound. As far as I can guess it must be some kind of ancient lost technology, perhaps nano-tech and it enables any of my bloodline to do unusual things. We can tap into energy and channel it, use it to reshape the substance of matter into whatever we desire. We can recombine molecules into different substances, we can even change molecules into other molecules by resonating with their energy vibrations and altering them, bypassing all of that atomic fusion and frission energy-release. Not only this, is has also been discovered that my kind can stabilize and exponentially increase the power of a Psi-wave by resonance."

Vash's eyes widened. He suddenly had a chilling image of what Legato might have been like had his own psychic powers been so increased. The man had already been powerful enough to easily take control of not just an entire town but Vash's own Psi-wave by resonance. It had been a chilling and horrifying experience to find himself suddenly no longer in control of his body or his powers.

"This ability leaves us exceedingly vulnerable to attack by a ruthless Psi, or rather a person with psychic or telepathic abilities, so it was the considered opinion of my ancestor that his decedents would be safer hidden in the wood-work of normal society. We have lived, generation to generation, passing down what little knowledge we have been able to recall or scrape together orally from son to son. Much of the knowledge of the purpose we were originally created, or adapted, for has been lost over time... until now."

The picture of the man telling his story had replaced the triple-helix some time ago and was at that moment replaced by another picture, Vash was surprised to recognize it, just a little. Intricate web-like spirals with periodic round nodes with complex mathematic-like sigils on them lined up like beads of dew on a spider-web spiraled out from a central node. Then another web-like grid layered over-top of it, the nodes of which connected to others in the previous grid and shrunk down in to fit inside the main grid's nodes, spiraling into their own individual patterns inside the node. It reminded him a little of pictures of the milk-way galaxy, with a glowing central nebula and the arms of the wheeling stars spiraling out from it, each star had a solar system to it and that solar system had a set number of planets that orbited at their own rates with their own individual moons and such.

The picture of the grid moved off to one side and another picture joined it, a scientific model of a collection of Hydrogen and Oxygen atoms floating around in space by themselves. The quiescent grid was connected by a small strand to the glowing blot in the center and the strand that connected all of the nodes in the grid began to light up, like someone lighting a fuse on a powder keg. The first node flashed "awake" blossoming like a little flower and the molecules shown in the side of the picture froze up instead of drifting aimlessly, then suddenly attracted to each other. Electron bonds formed and Vash quickly and easily recognized the compound by its polarity; two hydrogens and an oxygen... water. The grid on the left hand side of the screen kept going through whatever program was written for it and on the right hand side more molecules clustered together and replicated. Soon the picture zoomed out to show a faint mist, which coalesced into droplets of water which in turn pooled together into enough for a healthy drink.

"I had dreams... such dreams," the man said sadly, and with real regret. "Perhaps my brother was right when he said that some forces were better left alone. May my daughter forgive me for what I have done."

Milly and Vash exchanged another long, speaking look of puzzlement. What was so bad about making water? It seemed like a good thing to them.

"After the death of my Bonded Source, my beloved, the heart and center of my world... after Sarah's death, my emptiness consumed me. Not even my daughter's love could reach me, may she find it in her heart to forgive me. The only thing that kept me going was the promise I had made to my Bonded.

In the days when she was alive, we had dreamed of a world without hunger or thirst where there was enough in plenty to go around. We had dreamed of using my powers for the benefit of mankind, to create the world we saw in our dreams. But we overreached ourselves; the power necessary to create that world was far, far greater than could be generated by even an enhanced Psi-wave. Though I discovered that no matter how great the power after I had transitioned from fully human into Resonant, I was more than a match for it so long as I could resonate with my Bonded's Psi-wave. Using power "fresh off the tap" as I called it, meaning raw energy that was not produced by organic means, stings quite a bit and there is only so much that can be handled before the pain becomes to great to bear. After her death all that mattered to me was the mission. I couldn't bring her back to me, but I could fulfill her dream. To my everlasting shame... I--"

The image of the man looked so weary and torn with guilt. He took a deep, shaky breath and resumed his narrative a moment later.

"I had discovered a stone with the crystallized form of a new element, one which could store Psi-power, or the energy of a Psi-wave, and use that power to create even more energy. I called it energist."

Here Vash definitely started. It was all coming together, this guy was--

"And I used my own channels and the energist to physically create an array, a device, that could tap into and amplify Psychic energy. Even a normal human produces a very small, almost undetectable, Psi-wave, usually at a point-zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-one amplitude, not even large enough to register on most devices. But I figured that if I could get enough Psi to "kick start" the device, the energist crystal I grew and the array I had created would amplify the energy enough to where it could make real impact on the physical world. I could use all of that energy to write new grids and create all of the things we were lacking in this world, just as my bonded and I had planned."

Where would he get that much Psi? Vash thought to himself with a feeling of foreboding.

"This device could turn human will into energy, and I would use that energy to reshape the world as I saw fit. But first I needed enough Psi-energy. I reasoned that since the device was ultimately going to benefit them they wouldn't mind putting in the power that they don't use anyway. But I was impatient, my grief and pain blinded me to the immoral ruthlessness I had developed."

He looked so terribly sad and so ashamed. His eyes begged them both to try to understand, to try to forgive him for what he had done.

"I used the device to amplify the Psi-talent of a small, young telepath-boy I had found, an orphan with no family. I ordered him to call the rest of the town from what they were doing. I called them to the grounds where I had my device set up and I... hooked them into the array. Every man, every woman, even the children. I was only going to take a little, just enough to start the device, and once I had it going I was going to use it to save every one."

He was nearly sobbing in anguish now.

"But the device... it needed more. More than I had calculated it would. The variables that I had set up in my grid were all dependent variables, dependent on the amount of energy it took to activate the first Function Node on the Primary Grid. Once I had set it in motion, I discovered that there was no stopping it until the first function was complete. I watched on in horror as it drained the people of even the energy that it took to keep them alive. I watched them die, helplessly, one by one; first the children, and then the weaker more frail of the women and elderly, then at last the healthy. It drained them all; men and women that I had known for most of my life and I was powerless to stop the monster I had created. To this day I thank god that my daughter possess a latent strain of the Resonant Strand, she produces no psi-wave and thus would not have been attracted to the device. She, at least, was safe. but the rest, everyone of the entire village... all dead, and all my fault."

There were true tears of remorse streaming down his cheeks by then.

"I knew that such a device must never be allowed to fall into the hands of another for there are, as I well know, people who are ruthless enough to use whatever comes to hand so long as another pays the price for it and they are the ones to benefit. I dismantled the device and collected all of my journals and notes, and buried them along with the bodies of my poor, unwitting test subjects. Then I sealed away my daughters memories of what she is and how to use her powers so that she will never fall into the same trap I did. My brother will take good care of her, raise her like his own, and he has never approved of our _otherness _so she'll just be a normal woman. That's the way it should be. Better that my sins should die with me."

The last about his daughter was muttered, almost to himself. He continued his narrative

"As I was about to end my own life deep in the cave where I first found energist however, there came a soft heavenly voice, the most beautiful voice. It was like a thousand perfect voices all blended into one, and though I couldn't actually hear the words They spoke to me, my heart and soul understood Them. They told me to stay the hand that would have taken my own life. They offered me a chance at redemption if I would serve as Their vessel. I've cast aside my arrogance and erased my Self to serve a cause greater than me. To whomever finds this... there is hope. Hope for a better world, hope for a future. I will strive to the last iota of my power to serve as Their medium here in the world and to create the device my ancestors were bred for... the Gaea Device."

With that, the image faded, replaced by an image of the planet Gunsmoke as seen from space, silvery ribbons and lines of light spiraled out over the surface of the dry barren planet, centering on great nodes and lesser nodes. And then the "screen" went blank.

Vash suddenly had to sit down to absorb the impact. Could it possibly be saying what it sounded like it was saying? A small, precious speck of real, true hope blossomed into his chest. It was possible, maybe, maybe, _maybe _just possible that there was a way to have the world that humanity had dreamed of so long ago. He didn't know what a Gaea Device was or what it did exactly, but the indications in the man's lecture seemed to be obliquely pointing at the idea that... the device would be used to reshape matter and terraform the surface of their barren, inhospitable world into a garden.

Vash had always sort of _wondered _why in the world Rem and the captain would have wasted their time stopping by a planet that, while earth-sized and with a breathable atmosphere, had not enough of the right resources to truly support human life on its surface. It had been something that had puzzled him ever since he and Knives had crash-landed on Gunsmoke and gotten to know the place in all of its dry, dusty, hot, hellish glory.

But looking at this world as a possibility for colonization would make sense if you were looking at it from the point of view of having about the right-sized template to use as a blank slate for your own ends, he thought.

Rem must have been looking at it with an eye to terraformation! That's why she'd been so busy when they'd come across the planet and parked the flag-ship in orbit around it. Little bits and pieces of memory from around that time came floating back, things that, as a child and with the self-centeredness of childhood, he hadn't paid any notice to at the time. They way Rem had spent hours and hours cooped up in the computer room going through the database on plant samples, the way she'd maundered on about certain gradients of soil and temperature zones, the way she and the captain had gone on and on about model eco-systems. They'd been planning all along to change this world to meet their own ends before actually landing people on it!

_But then Knives beat them to the punch with his "kill the spiders and save the butterflies" craziness and it all went down hill from there,_ Vash thought glumly.

He perked up a little as another thought occurred to him. The Plants that powered the city via the machinery and ancient technology still left over from their ships also created geo-plants to support plant life. Maybe this guy, Michael Stryfe, had found a way to fuse together what ever it was that he could do with the sorts of things that his bulb-siblings could do and make it work. Then if he followed that thought... then maybe! _Maybe _some form of terraformation (however limited it might be) that was capable of truly being able to support life and be self-sustaining at the same time could be found. If there was even the smallest seed of hope, he had no doubt that people would band together to protect and nurture it until it could grow into a mighty oak that would shelter them all. This could be the beginning of a real future!

Vash had images of Rem's promised eden dancing before his eyes and a feeling of hope swelling in his chest. It was possible, the world they'd dreamed of was possible. He looked over at his traveling companion Milly to see if she'd had the same thought he'd had and her face did indeed though thoughtful. She opened her mouth to say something and Vash exulted in the idea that he actually had a friend to share this discovery with...

"He really did look a lot like Sempai, didn't he Mister Vash?" she noted innocently. Vash face-vaulted into the sand.

_The discovery of not just one, but several lifetimes, and she's concentrating on trivialities,_ he thought to himself.

Ah well, that was Milly he supposed. She was as she was.

"I guess," Vash said in reply, shrugging a little. "Well it looks like we've seen what Knives sent us here to see. Maybe now we can go and get Mer- Uh, Short Girl."

Vash had to start mentally distancing her from him again, otherwise he might not have the necessary perspective to do what was best when the time came. And Vash knew after this last debacle that it was best that Meryl, and Milly, should go home and leave him to sort things out with Knives.

"Vash the Stampede..." a voice from around the sands said to him.

It was an unfamiliar voice and Vash got that sinking feeling in his gut, the one that told him that his brother had generously sent more party-favors his way.

He looked around frantically, shoving Milly behind him in order to better protect her.

"Who's there, and where are you?!" he demanded of the hot desert air in general.

Knives didn't send his men out on a whim, Vash was already caught up in whatever game Knives had planned for him this time and he had better learn the rules fast. Meryl's life depended on it.

A soft rustle of cloth to his right and a man of just above average height and dark black hair cut long to his waist and braided into a hundred tiny braids stepped out of the shadow of a nearby building. His eyes had contacts in them that made them look like they were all entirely black, like birds eyes and he was wearing a costume of black leather cut to look like the feathers of a bird. His nose protruded, beak-like, from his face and the human skin that showed wherever his costume wasn't had been tatooed to look like stylized black feathers.

_It's a wonder he doesn't get heat-stroke_, Vash thought, partly hoping he would, just so Vash wouldn't have to put up with his brothers games any more.

"I am the ninth of the secondary-squad of the Gung-Ho Guns," he announced proudly with a small twisted smile.

_Great, there's more of them. Oi._

This one couldn't make the cut to the original squad, so beating him shouldn't be a problem. Vash suddenly found the happy image of himself having pounded the guy into the dust, forcing him to tell him where Meryl was so that he could cut the crap and get her back. Not a bad idea.

"I am Strell the Carrion Crow," he pronounced with relish.

_I'll bet in real life he had a dorky name, like Algernon_, Vash thought, waiting for him to finish his opening speech and tell him what Knives wanted so Vash could get down to business. Namely, kicking the crap out of him. Knives had used up all of his best on Vash already so it stood to reason that what he was using for servants now were the rejects and leftovers of his first attempts.

"The Master has sent me to give you a little present... Vash the Stampede."

From out of his leather-feather cloak, Strell the Carrion Crow pulled a box-like object and tossed it casually to Vash. Vash caught it one-handed and in that momentary distraction the Ninth secondary Gung-ho asshole disappeared back into the shadows again. That was fine for now, Vash was sure that he would find him later.

Milly looked over his shoulder as he examined the object. It was shaped like a hexagonal teardrop with a pointed top and the base flattened off. It was about three inches in diameter at the base with a height of about four or five inches, it was slightly translucent and dull-pewter-grey in color. Vash twisted the small knob at the tip and the six sides of the top opened like a blossoming flower petal, letting out a small hiss and some kind of cold vapor from its midst. As the top blossomed downward a small stand inside the box raised up and displayed its prize proudly. Vash gasped and instinctively flung the box from him on the apprehension of what the object inside the box was. The box landed base-down on the dirt road and flung its contents to the dust at their feet, almost as if taunting them.

It was a severed finger.

Milly gasped in horror, apparently recognizing as well the severed digit that had been carefully stored in a cryogenic container and presented to him. Her hands had always been amazingly tiny for someone her age, it had always sort of amused him. Of _course _she was stuck using derringers; they were the only sorts of gun that could fit comfortably in hands that were that small. Her pinky digit was almost child-sized, but by the delicate taper of the end and the well-manicured nails, it was definitely the finger of a grown woman. It was Meryl's pinky finger.

Pure undiluted rage welled up inside him again, trying to spread out from his core and seize control. Vash clenched his hands so hard that he could hear the metal of his prosthetic start to creak in protest at the pressure. His body shook with fine tremors, maintaining control of his temper by the barest of threads. Any little push one way or another could undo him... and perhaps god would have mercy of the person who got in his way but Crimson would not. Vash struggled, trying to calm himself of the anger that pushed against his defenses, and slowly, slowly managed to stuff it back down into the box that his brother had so carefully unlocked.

The present that his brother had given him was _more _than just a severed finger. A moment later as Vash had just barely managed to gather the shredded remains of his temper back into a semblance of control again, the little box lit up and a tiny doll-sized holographic projection of his brother Knives, alive, well, and apparently in full control of his facilities once more, lit up in the air above the box. Vash nearly lost it again by just having to look at him, knowing full well that he was the one responsible for the severed finger no longer being attached to his Short Girl.

"Greetings, dear brother," the image said, having the affront to look displeased with him. "As you can see I have declined to enjoy your so-called hospitality. But I'll be taking a souvenir with me to commemorate our time together Vash. Since it would be remiss of me not to offer to share with my only twin brother, I decided that I'd be happy to send a portion of it your way."

"You're generosity itself," he growled at the urbane and composed image of his brother.

"I am of course, more than willing to share more such portions with my twin--"

"I'll just bet," he gritted, his teeth clenched firmly against the rage welling up inside of him.

"But it shouldn't be necessary to do so, unless of course my brother should prove uncooperative with this tiny, minor, insignificant but ever so crucial little favor I would ask of him."

_Favor_?

Vash was brought up short by that. To his knowledge Knives was a do-it-yourself kind of psychopath, even those Gung-ho Guns he'd sent to harrass Vash had been nothing more than tools to his mind. It was unusual to say the least that Knives would send his brother on an autonomous mission for him without any oversight. But of course, the man did have Meryl, so Knives was probably pretty confident that Vash would do as was "requested" of him.

"A number of years ago I sensed a strange surge in power in this area," Knives' image continued, oblivious to Vash's internal thoughts.

"Shortly thereafter another power rippled softly through our siblings. I sent my servant out to investigate, naturally, but he in his incompetence could not find the source. I investigated of course through my own means and was able to discover that there now exists a strange latent network of ley-lines, but they are locked and sealed away inside a hidden place that cannot be breached by force. One must go to the sites individually and solve the trials placed there to keep the unworthy from reaching the prize. The prize inside each site is a part of a keystone. This keystone, once assembled will prove to be the key to unlocking the gates of eden. I wish for you, dear brother, the only other who is like me, to visit each of these sites, gain access to the prizes hidden therein, and assemble them for me. Once you return to me with proof of their unbinding, you may have the souvenir I took returned to you unharmed... or relatively so, anyway."

Vash scowled at the calm, unruffled, supremely confident visage of his brother, acting like he was king of the fucking world and sending Vash out on a wild goose chase like he was some lackey. And not to mention that he'd stolen Meryl away.

_I never thought I'd have reason to be slightly thankful that Knives despises humans so much_, Vash thought ruefully, already knowing that for the sake of Meryls safety he was going to do exactly as his brother had ordered him to.

_At least I know he won't get any funny **ideas **about her._

Most brothers would worry in a situation like that... strong, handsome confident male kidnaps pretty, helpless, defenseless female and takes her away to his fortress in the middle of nowhere to be held completely at his mercy. It seemed like a recipe for trouble, but since Knives would probably rather cut off his own arm than have to touch her, he knew that Meryl would remain safe from molestation. Vash only hoped that Knives remembered to feed and water her regularly.

Much as he hated the thought of leaving Meryl alone and helpless in the untender care of his twin, Knives had promised to return her unharmed and so far as Vash knew, when Knives said he'd do something he did it. So... that meant finding and gathering these "keystones" Knives was interested in.

His hand unconsciously strayed back up to the little necklace of Meryl's that she had given him for safekeeping. He promised himself that he'd find those damned sites, get those keystones, and get Meryl back well and unharmed.

"The first of the sites is located somewhere in the canyons near the dead village of Styfe. Good hunting, Brother."

And with that the image of Knives cut out.

Vash looked over at Milly, who looked back at him with a determined "let's do it" sort of expression.

"Mister Vash!" she said firmly. "Let's go find it and get sempai back!"

He nodded once in confirmation as his thumb rubbed along the side of the stone Meryl had given him. He was helpless to do anything else right then, but he'd do what he could so that he could bring her back safely. She'd just have to wait for him to find her, just for a little while.

* * *

**Ah, now we're getting somewhere! Thank's so much for all the wonderful reveiws I've been getting for this and sorry it's late. I was playing Final Fantasy 13 yesterday until my eyes bled. T_T Yay! Please leave a note in the box to tell me what you thought of this chapter.**


	22. The Great Escape

Meryl ducked quickly under his swing and jabbed the tips of her fingers into the join where his arm met his torso. Silvery strands that probably only _she _could see shot out of the tips of her fingers wrapped themselves around the moon-mist flowing channel of energy that was one of his major meridians and she jerked her hand back and pulled it out of alignment. His limb froze up, paralyzed for a moment and when Meryl squeezed the meridian with a pinching twisting motion the limb went dead and hung uselessly at his side. Nimble as a cat she flowed under his arm and turned her body around to face his back and placed the palm of her other hand on the center of his back opposite the sternum and more ephemeral channels shot out from her into his body. With a "grabbing" motion she wrapped them around the prime meridian, the one that ran down the spinal cord through all three of the dan'tien, and gave a hard yank then a snapping release motion. A pulse of light flashed though him in a wave, like the ripple when a stone was thrown into a pool of water. The assailant dropped to the floor, completely unconscious.

Meryl looked at the four men littering the floor of the boxcar that she and Miss Remembrance had invaded by stealth. They'd snuck out of their prison car via the window and out onto the roof... which had been guarded by an armed guard that Meryl had had to take out with her new-found abilities. It shouldn't have worked; he'd had a machine gun and had been enthusiastic in its use (forcing them to duck down under the eaves of the roof of the car for shelter from the gunfire... vash was much better suited to foolishness like this) but Meryl had gotten in a lucky shot to his shoulder and followed it up by another lucky shot to his gun hand.

Meryl had slid up onto the roof and in the interests of keeping their walk of the roof a secret decided to disarm him and attack him physically. That was when she'd discovered that her double-sight extended to more than just seeing atoms and the flow of energy, and that her channels were capable of more than just weaving grids. It had been nothing more to her than an extension of the Push Hands of tai'chi, taking the assailants strength and making it her own by attacking their dan'tien, it had felt _natural _even. Her channels had just shot out of the tips and palms of her hands to take over and redirect the flow of his energy.

She'd discovered that when she pulled on a meridian it had the effect of paralyzing the limb as long as she held it, and that she could, like someone tying a knot in a water hose, pinch and tie it off, paralyzing the limb without her having to hold it. She also discovered that when she "snapped" a persons prime meridian like a rubber band, it sent a life-force shockwave through them that rendered them unconscious instantly.

Miss Remembrance had reluctantly followed Meryl onto the roof and the two of them had snuck slowly and cautiously down to the end car of their little four-car sandsteamer. That was where Remembrance had guessed that their third comrade in kidnapping would be held. She'd been right, and the four burly guards stationed around the strange young woman had been very surprised to have a tiny woman crash through the window and start taking them out.

They'd been armed with long-knives and billy clubs for fighting in close quarters, Meryl had lucked out and they had no guns (presumably because they didn't want a stray bullet hitting the special prisoner). They clearly hadn't been working together long because they didn't all try to rush her at once instead, the first two had attacked together, discovered her strange paralyzing touch and been knocked out and the other two, after having witnessed her take out their comrades in a few moves bolted for the door to get help. The one nearest she'd shot in the leg and leapt on and the one closest the door... Remembrance, wincing and apologizing, had hit him over the head with a discarded club. The guard had been stunned long enough for Meryl to jump across the tiny room and attack. He had been the last.

"Is she okay?" Meryl asked of Remembrance who was concernedly looking over the young woman chained to the wall nearby. Meryl was busy tieing up the men she'd just knocked out with some convenient nearby train-chain.

Knives's standards were certainly slipping! These men he'd employed to make off with her were little more than hired thugs, certainly not of the caliber that he'd sent after Vash previously. Meryl wondered if she should feel relieved or insulted by that. They had left all of her spelunking equipment and her pack within the same room they'd used to hold her instead of taking it and locking it away like any sensible kidnapper would have done, and they left materials for taking over and tying up prisoners just lying around for anyone to use.

"As near as I can tell," Remembrance said pensively, examining the young woman chained to the wall minutely.

Meryl was feeling pretty tired by that point and wondered to herself when all of this foolishness was going to end. Was she supposed to take over the entire sandsteamer? Granted, it was a small one, but the engine room and steering room were probably crammed with more people, plus there were probably others on the other cars of the train. Meryl didn't think that she was capable of fighting all of them, especially if she had to take on more than one at a time. The only other choice was to cross the desert on foot and without knowing where she was or where the nearest town might be found was pretty darned close to suicidal.

She pulled a key off one of the unconscious guards and tossed it to Remembrance to unlock the other girl with.

_Then again, allowing them to take us to where-ever it is that they were going to probably isn't a good idea either_, she thought to herself.

There were probably more people to fight at their destination and the guard they'd left would know about Meryl's new paralyzing abilties if not the rest of it.

_I guess it would be better in this case to try to sneak away as quietly as possible, without arousing any suspicion_, she decided.

With any luck, by the time the captors went back to check on thier prisoners they'd have been gone for some time.

"I'm going to detach this car from the rest of them," Meryl told Remembrance. "With any luck, they won't notice we're missing for a while yet and we can get a good way away from wherever we eventually stop at."

"Sounds as good a plan to me as any," Remembrance agreed. "I'll try to get her to come around, she's pretty out of it."

Meryl stepped out of the front of the cabin and looked at the big metal hitch that connected this boxcar with the one in front of it. She mentally summoned her grid screen. She was getting familiar enough with it now that weaving a grid was fairly simple. It felt a lot like dialing in the combo on a combination lock; first carefully line up the first number (or in her case prepare the source node) then turn in the opposite direction and pass for the second number (or spiral out the grid pattern and line up the function nodes) then turn the dial in the oposite direction and line up the third number (or make the ending node) and then finally pull the top up (or connect to the source node and let the grid do its work).

As she started prepping her Source node Meryl looked at the unconscious forms of the men she'd just overcome and felt an insidious little speculation enter her thoughts. She hadn't found a way to access other kinds of power, but she could direct the energy from their meridians and sources perfectly well. It occurred to her that instead of using her _own _life energy from her own Source to power the grid... she could use _theirs_. It would serve them right for kidnapping her! She built her grid and stepped over to where they lay unconscious, fully intending to borrow from them the means of escape. She bent over them and started to reach her channels towards their Sources to connect it to the grid she'd just woven when she _hesitated_.

She paused, examining them. Something about it just didn't feel right. In one way it sort of made sense to her to use their energy to fuel her grid instead of her own, she needed to conserve her strength and they were the enemy, so they deserved what they got.

But something in her told her no. She wasn't sure what it was about it, but her instincts told her it was _wrong_.

She sighed a little, but decided to trust herself.

_Damn_, she thought with a little wistful disappointment as she accessed the slender and dwindling reserves from her own Source. _And it would have made things so much easier too._

A matter of moments later, with Meryl feeling dizzy and lightheaded from using her own Source energy, she took one of the metal billy clubs and shattered the brittle, frozen metal of the car-hitch and watched as the sandsteamer pulled away from their now detached car, which slowed down quickly without something to pull it along. She watched it go with a feeling of profound relief but knew she wasn't out of the woods yet. If their kidnappers discovered them missing at any time soon all they would need to do would be to follow the tracks in the sand back to their position so they would have to abandon the relative safety of the car and go somewhere else.

"It's done, they're nearly over the horizon by now. I don't want to waste this chance to get away, because it's the only one we'll get so we're going to have to get out of here. Can she move?"

Remembrance was supporting the weight of the slumped over girl on her shoulders, trying to get her to respond to her questions. She looked as out of it as a druggie jonesing on their latest fix. Her eyes were wide and unfocused and little noises emitted from her mouth and she occasional jerked to one side or the other.

"Maybe she had a bad reaction to the drugs they put her on," Meryl surmised. "If that's the case, maybe I can clean her out."

Meryl snapped into that double-sight that allowed her to see the other side of the world and snapped back out of it just a quickly with an exclamation of pain and surprise. The brightness emitting from the young woman they'd just rescued was completely blinding in her other-sight. The other woman was _radiant_, an immense sun of lambent power welled up from within her, power such as Meryl could barely begin to understand. It frightened her a little for a moment, how could a person contain that kind of energy and not burn everything around them to ash?

"What the he-?!" meryl demanded, rubbing her eyes to clear them of the afterimage of the other woman's inner form.

"What happened?" Remembrance asked in concern. "Are you alright?"

"Yeah but... what the heck _is _she?" Meryl demanded next, pointing to the other woman.

She didn't have the normal focus-points of light (of dan'tien) surrounded by flowing spiralling meridians, instead she seemed to be one large being made entirely of energy, like a giant walking well-spring of power.

The young woman looked over at her and fell slumped over Remembrance's shoulder, leaning heavily for support and that was when Meryl noticed something that had escaped her cursory glance previously.

Wings.

Fluffy, white, feathery, wings. Sprouting from her back.

"She's... she's an angel," Meryl murmured in surprise, almost unable to believe it.

Oh, she knew they existed, Vash had told her that he was one of them free to travel outside of the bulb (though it was still a mystery how, everything she'd ever heard about the theoretical possibility had said that they gave off too great a level of energy to be safe to the surrounding environment outside of a containment sphere). But it was one thing to hear about it, even from a trusted friend, and another thing to see an actual honest-to-goodness Plant Angel for herself. Wings and everything.

The woman opened her eyes and focused them on Meryl and in the next instant Meryl very much wished she hadn't. Meryl's skin and blood and bones started a strange, uncomfortable humming vibration, like she was sitting next to the bass speaker at a loud rock concert and the pulse of the music was thrumming through her, making her skin buzz and her bones shiver. The feeling of power spread over her skin in a not-entirely-pleasant sensation, like the feeling of sticking your tongue on the ends of a small battery and the mild current made your tongue sting and feel numb, excepting that it was all over her _body_. Latent power siezed her body and jolted through her.

Meryl shuddered and tried to jerk away from the uncomfortable sensation but before she could give much more than that reaction to the new sensation her head was suddenly inundated by strange images that were not her own making. She saw her brother featured quite prominently in a number of them, followed by a wonderful feeling of wholeness and freedom, then discomfort of a creature who has lived all of their existence in a sheltered, safe, contained environment suddenly finding themselves having to deal with the harsh, hot dusty dry air of the planet. There were more images that Meryl couldn't quite make out, flickering past her internal eyes faster than she could follow them, a riot of emotions and impressions flitted by just as quickly. The sensation was dizzying and disorienting, like when she had sat in her papa's office chair and spun and spun and then suddenly stopped it and her head kept going. It felt like the floor rolled underneath her and she put an arm out to steady herself.

"Stop, stop stop!" Meryl begged after a minute, automatically clapping her hands over her ears in the same way that someone might use to protect their ears when faced with a cacophony of noise that was too loud to handle.

Meryl felt her entire being inundated with a feeling of longing so intense that it literally stole her breath away from her, the feeling of being bereft of the one thing in the world that she needed to exist was like almost physical sensation, like someone was squeezing her chest like a dishrag. It wasn't her own emotion, it was coming from the Angel, and it felt like someone had taken the material of her soul and stretched it thin, nearly to the breaking point. It was more than discomfiting, it was _maddening_. Meryl didn't know how she could bear it. There was the feeling of a large part of her missing, like her arm was supposed to be there but it mysteriously wasn't and now she didn't know how to cope without it.

"Okay! Okay!" Meryl snapped, trying to get through to the other... being, and make her stop.

The sensation subsided but didn't go away entirely, the dizziness and thobbing in her bones dimmed considerably but her skin still tingled unpleasantly and she could feel a headache start to seep into the area around her temples.

"Is she talking to you?" Remembrance asked, looking surprised.

"I wouldn't really call it _talking_," Meryl grumbled, holding her head against the sharp stabbing pain that began to throb behind her eyes.

"But she is communicating with you," Remembrance pressed.

"I guess so," Meryl shrugged. "Unless _you're_ telepathic."

"No. No, it must be her. But that's odd, she's not supposed to be able to do that. She shouldn't be able to talk with anyone besides her Bondmate. Not at this stage anyway."

"Whatever," Meryl grumbled. "I'm going to see what kind of gear I can throw together, and then we're getting out of here."

Anything to get away from the source of that irritating feeling. Meryl had more than enough strangeness in her life as it was, she just wanted to concentrate on normal things for a while. She glanced down irritatedly; that strange buzzing feeling was still shivering through her body and it was really annoying.

"And would you _stop _it?!" she snapped at the angel.

It thankfully cut off almost entirely and Meryl went about her work. They had to get out of there as quickly as possible.

* * *

_He didn't know how long he had been floating there in the dark nothingness he had been put into. He couldn't see or hear anything, all around him was darkness and silence, neverending until he thought he might go mad of it. He couldn't hear his own voice!_

_He wasn't even sure if he had a body anymore, he couldn't feel anything. Trapped alone in the dark, unable to hear or see or smell or feel made him wonder if her was even real at all. if it weren't for that tiny moonmist cord, streched thin but connected to his bondmate on the outside he would probably have given up on himself. But he could feel her out there, searching for him trying desperately to reach his side and he knew he had to hold it together for her sake. So he recited poetry in his head, sang songs, counted, anything to keep himself distracted. He bided his time and waited._

_It almost a pity they didn't take big sis instead of me, he thought a little maliciously. it wasn't that he harbored her any ill will (no matter how bossy and annoying she could be at times) but if they had tried to take her on instead of him he had no doubt that they'd have btten off more than they culd chew. His sister wasn't powerful but if you got on her bad side she could get really scary. She'd have probably neatly and efficiently handed those goon's asses back to them then went off to file a report about it, probably in triplicate._

_He was surprised to find out how much he actually missed her now that she wasn't there. He came to see that he'd sort of taken it for granted that she'd always be there for him, all he had to do was call. Now he couldn't reach her and had to rely on his own strength to see him out of his trouble and he had no idea where to start. marcus was good at getting into trouble, figuring his way out when someone else got him into it was not something he was prepared to handle very well._

_There's no-way I can just let them do what they want though, he told himself. That creepy gold-eyed Legato guy had been very very clear about his "Masters" plans for him, and Marcus knew he wanted no part in them. They ran counter to everything that Marcus believed in. No-one had the right to take the life of another. He wouldn't cooperate with them in their designs, even if it meant his life. There was simply noway he could countenence it._

_:For now I have no choice but to simply wait,: he counseled himself. It was annoying; patience had never been somethig he'd been very good at. On the other hand, he couldn't acces his Source from so far away, so he was pretty well stuck there. He let himself drift off to sleep, trying to warn his bondmate about the trouble he was in.

* * *

**Ooooh, another update. And it's a two-fer! I hope you all enjoyed it and please look forward to the next instalment.**_


	23. The Game is Afoot

Knives hadn't left him with very specific instructions at all, a more specific ball-park figure of the area he was to search would have been nice. "Down in the canyons" didn't help him much. Didn't his brother realize that these canyons stretched on for miles and miles in meandering labyrinthine passages, quarries and caves in many different directions? A person could easily get lost in them and Vash was supposed to find _one _particular cave entrance, one that was most likely well hidden and camoflauged, in this maze? The term needle in a haystack came to mind.

_Needle in a haystack_... the thought nudged something in Vash's memory.

....

"What's that mean Rem?" a young Vash asked innocently one day when she was remarking on an errand the captain had set her on to search through the computer files manually to find one specific sub-routine that was causing a glitch in the diagnostic systems when he'd been busy with some program or other. She'd mumbled something about a needle in a haystack and, curious, Vash had asked for clarity.

"It means trying to find an object that mixed in a big pile of similar-looking objects. It can also mean a difficult or seemingly impossible task."

Vash knew what a needle was (he and Knives had been poked by them often enough) and he'd come across "hay" before in his reading, though he'd never actually seen it with his own eyes, he'd seen pictures of them and got the concept of the similarities except...

"But Rem," Knives said, having the same thought as his brother, though he was quicker to grasp the loopholes of the situation than his younger brother.

"A needle is not straw, the materials are different. Hay is a grain by-product brought about by removing the granules of wheat from the stalks they grow on, needles are made of metal. They only look similar, they're not the same thing."

"Yeah, why don't they just use a magnet Rem?" he asked hard on the heels of his brother. "Magnets attract metal, the needle would come right out of the pile because hay isn't attracted to magnets."

Rem had smiled fondly at the two of them and ruffled their hair saying,

"I guess not everyone is as smart as you two are."

...

The memory was a fond one but Vash didn't see how it could be immediately useful, he was looking for a power source a gate of some kind... Vash looked down at his arm, his real one and the connection dawned on him.

_This arm often reacts to power_, he thought recalling that strange peaceful buzzing feeling that often hummed over his skin when he went to visit his siblings at their power plants. Could he use it in a similar principle to locate the power source hidden in the canyon?

He frowned a bit at that; he wasn't certain it was a good idea to experiment with it. Over the years Vash had very carefully and conscientiously layered on the best shields he could come up with. When compared to his brother's shields Vash's were a spotty, unreliable patchwork affair of cobbled-together bits of energy that sometimes vied with one another for competency. Knive's shields were smooth, perfect impenetrable affairs that were only lowered when he wanted them to be. Still, they were all Vash's had and they were better than nothing. He spent the majority of his time alone in the desert concentrating on them so that he could keep them up under any and all circumstances (except when he'd encountered Legato that time). Bad things happened when he let his guard down.

But its either locate that damned gate, or leave Meryl with Knives, he thought with a feeling deep in his gut that the latter option wasn't a very good one. His brother (Vash hated to admit) had a bit of a vindictive streak, if there was a way to strike back at him so near to hand Knives might give into the temptation. No, the sooner he got Meryl away from Knives the _better_, which meant hurrying up and finding that damned gate his brother had set him to look for.

_If it's for her_... Vash thought, closing his eyes and readying himself with a feeling of trepidation. If it was to get her back safe, he'd risk it.

"Milly, go over behind those rocks. It should be safer over there."

Mystified but obedient, Milly sheltered behind a pile of rocks a ways away and Vash held his real arm out before him. He slowly and very, very carefully began to mentally relax his guard. It felt a little like loosening a muscle that he held tight for so long that he wasn't even aware that he held it that way any more. Soft power began to radiate softly out from the seed in his arm but it, thankfully wasn't transforming. There was no catalyst this time to force the change, no artificial channel to shape and funnel the power, no resonance to blow open wide the gate so all Vash got this time was a slight flow smoothing over his skin like a current of warm water. It felt... pleasant. Light and feathery, like being brushed by a hundred downy feathers. It wasn't threatening at all!

Then Vash opened his eyes.

He nearly clammed back up at the sight of his skin glowing. It was a soft glow, a white soft glow radiating out from his skin with a slightly milky pearlescent tinge to it and his skin had a soft... downy look to it. He was sort of fuzzy! Not furry, but there was a slight suggestion of feathery softness about him. He'd known all of his life that he wasn't human, but this was weird, even for him. And it was making him nervous. He was about to pull himself back under those so-carefully constructed shields of his when he noticed something. The world around him didn't look quite the same as it usually did.

Vash's vision was acute, extremely so. He could see well in the dark and his eyes were sharp as a hunting falcons, he could even "zoom in" and see things that were far away as close up an in as great a detail to him as if he were standing only a few feet away. The same went for his other senses of course and due to his increased reflexes he could snap into a vision that was so quickly processed in his brain that he could actually see bullets moving as if they were in slow motion. But he'd never seen things the way he did now.

The entire world was painted in vivid colors, it vibrated softly like tint tiny pixels going fuzzy on a screen that was oddly defined. Vash studied it for a moment and realized that if he narrowed his vision and tried looking through the fuzzy dancing pixels he could see a strange sort of flow to it, like looking into a pool of water that seems still but then you realize that the tiny speks of dirt in it are moving somewhere. He studied it for a moment and his vision narrowed further, there was a strange sort of stream at his feet, a tiny trickle sinking into the desert sand and doing unknown things to it. Vash ignored whatever it might be doing in favor of trying to trace its origins.

His arm too was reacting, there was a soft sort of gentle hum from it, almost imperceptible but definitely there. Vash motioned to Milly to follow him and began tracing the little trickle of energy upstream. Milly didn't comment, seeming to be able to sense how much Vash needed to focus to be able to see the little stream of energy. She followed silently through the canyons as the tinty trickle became a little rivulet and the rivulet became a minuscule streamlet which gradually widened and deepened out into a sizable stream of power. He traced the flow of energy to a solid rock-wall of sandstone in the bottom of a windworn gully. The resonance-buzzing in his real arm grew more pronounced the larger the flow of power.

Vash looked at the rock, but even to his new sight, it looked like a solid rock wall, with no catches or openings at all.

"This is definitely the place," Vash informed Milly.

He could sense a great well-spring of energy just beyond the barrier his arm was fairly twitching with it. Oddly enough, it felt strangely familiar to him; not the soft familiar energy that came from his siblings, it felt differnt from that but at the same time Vash could swear that he felt it somewhere before... recently.

"But where Mister Vash?" Milly questioned. "I don't see anything but a rock."

Vash walked up to the wall, intent of physically feeling around it when he became aware of a soft buzzing feeling and a strange warmth in the hollow between his two collarbones, where Meryl's necklace rested underneath his shirt. he glanced down to see a soft glow radiating from under the cotton of his shirt. He reached in and pulled the necklace out and it jerked quite noticeable toward the wall. Acting on a hunch, Vash brought it nearer and the entire rock rippled and silvered over, just as the headstone in the town had.

"Hey!" Milly exclaimed nearly jumping back from where she'd joined him at his side at the sight of the entire rock-face turning into a liquid-silver mirror. But instead of clearing away into a doorway or tunnel (or any other kind of opening) the surface of the mirror resolved into another kind of screen. An image appeared on it.

"Look, Mister Vash," Milly pointed. "It looks like some kind of..."

First there was a number inside a large false sphere in the center of the screen, which was then surrounded by a circle of little computer drawn "gems," in the center of each gem was a letter or two. H, He, O, Si, Au, Fe and others that Vash quickly recognized as being elements from the periodic table. Surrounding the inner circle of elements was a ring of computer-drawn spheres, floating in the center of those spheres were little plus and minus signs. The inner circles were surrounded quickly by another, larger, ring of element gems on the outside. His brow furrowed in puzzlement, but quickly cleared a little when a timer, counting down from five minutes appeared in one corner, and a chemical matrix model appeared in another corner. He knew what this was; he'd played them (or rather, ones vaguely like them) often enough as a boy on the ship...

"A game," he finished. He didn't actually know the rules yet, but it couldn't be that hard to figure out. Vash waited a few moments but no instruction screen started up, so it appeared that he was going to have to figure it out by trial and error. He tried pushing the middle sphere down and nothing happened, but when he tried pushing on an element gem on the inner ring it lit up and stayed highlighted so he tried one of the other symbols on the next two rings out. Once he'd chosen a symbol on the third ring there came a flat sound and the screen cleared showing a new screen with a new timer. it took a few more tries before Vash finally figured it out.

"It has to do with atomic numbers," he said finally, making the connection at last. "I pick an element from the first ring to start with, then those plus and minus signs in the second ring are for what kind of electron-bond I would make in order to chain with an element from the third ring. The trick, besides chaining the molecules and getting the right bonds, is to make the atomic numbers all add up with the number on the core sphere. Once you match that number you get the next round set up."

"What's that chain of molecules on the outside then, Mister Vash?" Milly asked next, pointing to the chemical matrix in the corner underneath the timer.

"I think that's how you win the level," he said. "You have to fill out all the molecules in that chain with ones from inside the rings as you go along but do it before the time runs out."

"Gosh," she mumbled looking at it. "It looks hard."

"Relax," he cracked his knuckles. "This stuff's easy for me."

That certainly wasn't a lie, because of what he _was, _he could handle maths a billion times faster than even the caculators on the ships, and since he never forgot anything once he knew it, chemistry wasn't exactly a mystery to him... he'd been a very curious boy on the SEEDs ships and Rem and the captain had certainly encouraged his and Knive's inquisitiveness in the realms of science.

The game started him out chaining the simple molecules from only the first three levels of the periodic table, and those were only in simple combination. Vash could have done it in his sleep. After he'd gotten all of the molecules filled in on the matrix off to one side the screen cleared and remade itself with another ring added on. Vash noted that there were also elements from the fourth level; potassium, titanium, iron, selenium and so forth mixed in with the simpler elements. So, the higher his level went the more complex the board got, higher-level elements with more rings meant longer and more complex chains. The core number also got bigger. Still... Vash was confident that he was more than a match for it. He could do calculations like this in his sleep.

Minutes later Vash's hands flew furiously over the board tapping out elements and bonds in rapid succession. His face was a frown of concentration as his mind built up possible chains and broke them down inside his head calculating the total atomic numbers combined with the feasibility of the chain and the exact type of electron bonds that would exist in the chemical matrix of it. It was challenging. The timer didn't help matters.

"Do you need to take a break?" Milly asked.

"Got this," he muttered distractedly, still working at the puzzle.

There were five rounds in a level and he was already on level three. He didn't know how far it went, but he was determined to get inside so he had no choice but to beat the game. It was challenging, because it had been a long time since he'd thought about anything remotely scholarly; just trying to survive in his life was challenge enough for him on most days, especially when Knives sent assassins his way and he had his insurance girls to protect. So his skills at things like this were a little rusty, still...

_Knives might be the scholar of the two of us, but I'm no slouch either_, Vash throught proudly as he cleared another level under the time allotted and moved on to the next. The fourth level was at the point where it was actually getting quite difficult to keep track of all the myriad details of the game, but he was managing. He took Milly's advice and took a break when he passed the third round on it. By then he really needed it, there was a dull ache starting behind his eyes.

"Looks like it's tough," Milly commented.

"Yeah," he agreed. "No wonder Knives sent me after it."

His brother could as easily do it himself of course but, Vash paused coming across an irregularity. The thought occurred to him that no _human_, unless he'd been a genius chemist, could hope to beat that game. For one thing, the time allotted was ridiculously short, a person would have to be able to move more quickly than most could, as well as be able to chain and deconstruct complicated molecule chains in his head... quickly. Had it even been developed for a human to beat?

_Curiouser and curiouser_, Vash thought.

There were a number of mysteries surrounding the affair, and that made Vash very nervous. he'd had enough of being manipulated and led around by the nose by his own twin brother to recognize it when it was happening to him, and it made him wary of the purpose behind it.

After a short break Vash was at it again, his hands became nothing more than a blur after a few minutes as the time allotted him grew shorter, the chains grew longer and the number of rings he had to work with grew greater. Chemical equations flew across his mind so fast that they were little more than a flicker; build up, break down, add up the numbers. He felt a surge of triumph as he made it up to the last round of level nine; by that point the chemical chains were nine elements long and the time allotted him was under a minute to beat the round and go on to the next... meaning he had one shot at it. If Vash hadn't been as he was, he'd have never been able to do it.

Milly gave out a cheer as the tenth level was breached and the board lit up brilliantly, then faded and the liquid silver of the "rock face" flowed into a door-shape which split in half and opened o let the two of them in.

"Whew!" Vash wiped his brow. The game had gotten pretty intense at the final level, but he'd managed to win.

"What do you think is in there?" Milly asked, peering anxiously into the stark, rectangular doorway.

The daylight went for a little ways beyond the entrance but then all faded into darkness. It looked like it was a long dark tunnel leading straight into the side of the canyon.

"Only one way to find out," Vash mumbled, recovering himself. "Let's find that thing Knives sent us after and get Meryl back."

Milly nodded once, firmly. Vash checked his gun, no sense in not taking precautions, and went first into the darkened tunnel. He was really starting to dislike being underground.

The tunnel walls were unnaturally smooth and perfect and went straight into the rock wall, perfectly level. After about twenty yarz of traveling in the darkness the tunnel abruptly ran into a dead end. Vash walked up to the stone to see if he couldn't find a catch or a lever or something that would allow him to continue on. As he approached the end-wall, the smooth surface at the end of the tunnel glowed flourescent white and a strange pattern of lines started to write themselves on the surface of the stone.

"Hey!" Vash yelped in recognition, taken very much aback to find that he recognized the pattern, or at least something that was very much like it. He'd seen one inside the water-carved cave when he'd gone spelunking with Meryl just before the disaster with his brother had hit. Meryl had been separated from him after she had started playing with the symbols.

There was a large circle in the middle, and out of it a line spiraled out. On that line were several smaller circles lined up like beads on a string. Vash, on a hunch, touched one of the small circles along the spiraled line and it not only blossomed outward the main spiral faded to a dim grey and "receded" back, letting the circle zoom in and grow large. Inside that enlarged circle there was another spiral from a central circle this one had a symbol in it, and the line spiraling round and round outside of it had more little circles, empty ones. Then on a screen off to one side the game-board that Vash had just finished mastering appeared. Elements and electron bonds highlighted themselves, and as they did parts of the grid lit up and filled with symbols. Vash recognized again an formula for creating a particular chemical in a particular quantity over a certain period of time using a specific amount of energy. The node then finished itself and receded back into the primary spiral-grid thing and the pattern moved onto the next.

_Something familiar about this thing_, Vash thought looking at the different chemical chains that made up the grid.

The chamber beyond the door was a perfect circle under a domed ceiling. There was a wide stone lip all the way around it from the wall out and the rest of the chamber in the middle was filled with water. The water would have looked dark and bottomless from if it had been lit from underneath by a glowing blue-white light. In the center of the underground lake was a straight, white beam of light, shining down onto a round, flat-topped pedestal of milky-white glowing stone standing on a dais about waist-high on an ordinary man. Hovering in the air over the pedestal, something glinted in the light.

Vash and Milly exchanged a long glance.

"I thought he said it was supposed to be some kind of gate, or something like that," Vash muttered. He'd been wondering how the hell he was supposed to haul a gate out to give to his brother but all he saw in front of him was some cut glass trinket about four inches high or so, hovering in mid-air. Shrugging, he walked out onto the lip of the stone terrace that led to the lake and a set of stepping stones rose up out of the water, leading to the dais with the little glass trinket on it.

"You stay here," he cautioned Milly. "I'll go and get the thing, whatever it is. Hopefully, it'll make Knives happy and he'll give us Meryl back for it."

Vash proceeded confidently out over the stepping stones and up onto the dais. Once he got close to the object, he could see clearly what it was. An irregular-shaped tetra-hedron made out of perfectly flawless opaque black stone that resembled obsidian in its polished glassy smoothness, or perhaps some kind of crystal. It was cut off at an angle on one side, sloping a bit like a sharp rooftop with a line from the tip to a smaller triangular base. The sides weren't even, and it sort of bothered him a bit. He put a hand out and touched the crystal preparatory to taking it into his possession. The moment his fingers touched it, there was a holographic projection of a man standing in the beam of light.

"What you hold in your hands now is a piece of the hope and the future of this world and the aspirations of our ancestors. I have given my life in service to Those Who Live Outside of Time, to create the meridians that travel throughout this world and the nine great node where they meet. This keystone is but one of eight, that when united will bring into fruition the project which I have given my life to see accomplished. You who have solved the first puzzles have taken the first steps towards the future and the completion of Their designs. You and your Bondmate must find the eight nodes and unite the keystone, only then can you fulfill your destiny, the destiny which has waited for so long."

Suddenly the room, which had until that point been mostly dark except for the light under the water turned into the light of day. Vash found himself to appear to be standing outside, in the middle of a green, grassy field that stretched from horizon to horizon in and endless wavering sea of green. He recognized what it was, of course, he had spent the happiest days of his childhood in the holographically projected rec-room on the SEEDs ship, he knew a hologram when he saw one. The grassy plain was replaced by a vision of a sea-side with the waves pulling in and out and a beach stretching on. This was replaced by a dense tropical forest teeming with verdant green life and trees and vines growing thickly together as far as the eye could see.

"Unite the pieces of the keystone and it will lead you to the source node for the Gaea Device in the ninth city. And there, Bonded ones, you will fulfill your destiny, and it will be a new world. The Device can only be activated by the unification of all the parts of the keystone in the hidden city, and it can be accessed only by a Bonded pair. There is an additional safety put into place to protect it, but it is not one you need to concern yourself with. Simply gather the other parts of the Keystone and the rest will attend to itself. Good luck, and godspeed to you."

Milly and Vash both exchanged amazed looks as the image of the old man faded and they were left with nothing but a quiet dark room.

"You think it's really possible?" Milly asked in the quiet that followed.

"I don't know," Vash replied honestly. "There is one thing I do know though, if it is true and it's really possible to change the world using this Gaea thingy, Knives can't be allowed to have the keystone for it. I hate to have to say this, but he'd only use it for his own ends, and those ends wouldn't be any good for anyone, especially humanity."

"But what about Meryl?" Milly asked next. "If we don't bring him proof that we've found what he sent us after..."

"I know," he said seriously.

"C'mon," Milly said, nudging him towards the entrance of the cavelet. "You'll think better with food in your belly. You can't plan a rescue on an empty stomach. Let's go back to camp and get something to eat, then we can plan our next move."

It was pretty good advice so Vash shrugged and reached to where the crystal thing was still hovering in mid-air and pulled it towards him. To his surprise the thing gave a final flash of blinding white light, seeming to pulse in his hand like a living heartbeat then it lay there in his palm, quiescent, as he examined it. It looked ordinary enough, and that made him even more nervous. He shook his head a little, sighed, and stowed it away carefully in his pocket then followed Milly out of the cave.

* * *

**It was funny, I had this monster mostly finished over a year ago, grid system and all and i'd felt so proud of myself for being so imaginative about it then, like Inkydoo pointed out, I got Final Fantasy 13 just about a week or two ago and discovered that their leveling up thingy, the Crystarium looked _exactly _like how I had imagined my own grid system (minus the sub-grids)! I was torn between happiness and irritation. Part of me was over the moon at seeing them make something I'd only imagined, the other part of me was thinking Geeze! Get out of my head!" **

**On another note... I did the (shudder) math, people, and discovered that with all the chapters still yet to come, posting a new one up twice a week just isn't going to cut it. We'd be here for months if I tried, so guess what, provided I have the time, you all get an upgrade. Three chapters a week. Hopefully anyway. The last-minute formating and editing can be a bit of a pain, but we'll see how it goes. **

**As always, I hope you enjoyed the latest instalment and please read and reveiw. Until next time!**

**~Nightheart.  
**


	24. Preparation is 910 of the War

Meryl had gathered everything she could find that was portable that looked remotely useful onto a wide, white sheet that she'd cut into long thick strips with the intention of making three packs out of it (though heaven only knew how she was supposed to get the angel to carry a pack on her back). She was currently ensconced in the project of sorting through the miscellaneous paraphernalia piling up what they'd be able to survive with and discarding what was useless. It was the heat of mid-day and even the inside of the steamer-car was sweltering. She wanted to get the emergency packs sorted as quickly as possible and get the hell out of there before those kidnappers came back after her and her new friends.

"Ahhh!" Meryl cried out involuntarily, doubling over in sudden agony.

She clutched her stomach as a sudden searing pain shot into her lower abdomen. It felt like someone had taken a branding iron and was writing with it on her skin. She cried out again in pain as it seemed to throb hard, burning out in curling lines from the central point. Moments later it was gone as suddenly and inexplicably as it had come on. Utterly mystified, Meryl curiously pulled up the bottom edge of her tanktop to see what had burned her.

Her stomach wasn't burned, but there was something there that hadn't been there that morning. A strange circular tattoo-like painting on her skin, but instead of being written in dark ink, it was written in a fluid silver, like someone had written in lines of quicksilver over her flesh. It was a silver so pure that it shone mirror-white in the light, and it didn't really feel like metal, it was blood-warm for one thing, and for another it wasn't stiff, it moved and rippled with the play of flesh and muscle, as natural as her very own skin. Meryl found that her heart was pounding and she wasn't certain why, but she thought it might have been fear.

:_Is this a consequence of using that... that **thing**_?: she wondered to herself. If so, it was painful enough to where she was pretty certain that she wanted nothing more to do with it.

:_This is what you get for messing about in things you don't understand_: she chided herself.

Maybe she should have just left it alone and tried to figure another way out of her cage. Well, what was done was done and there was no helping it now. She'd just have to be more cafeful in the future, no more messing with the weird grid, and her own Source and all of that strangeness. From now on she was just going to handle situations as a normal woman would.

With that resolution set firmly in her mind, Meryl finished dividing up the useful spoils into the three makeshift packs (she'd carry one in addition to the gear she'd recovered from her spelunking harness and pack) made of torn plas-fabric sheets. She also made make-shift wind capes for all of them t keep the sun from burning their skin and the sand-laden wind from scouring thier bodies.

"Where are we?" Remembrance asked, still stooped over the form of thier third party member, a young woman whose name Meryl had yet to learn.

"I'm not sure exactly," Meryl said honestly. "I do know that we're somewhere along the fault line between the Vareth Continental Plate and the Morcaster Plate, its a convergent plate boundry and right now were located along a cliff side. One side, the side we're on, has desert for weeks. That's the Murmuring Winds sand-sea and we're just at the edge of it. You go down this cliff and you're in basalt country. It's volcanically active and hotter than hell, but once you get past it, there's mountains and... well other stuff too."

"Would that other stuff include civiliation?" Remembrance asked.

"Yes, there are some mining towns along the Conrad Range that provide raw goods for the inland towns and cities; minerals, metals and some better stone for building... the only problem is..."

Meryl pointed way off into the distance beyond the rising heat haze. The suns that beat down into the dark rock of the basalt in the valley were superheated, even hotter than the air over the desert. Beyond the twisted, knotted maze-like terrain of the basalt rock formations lay a wide patch of open sand, it looked smooth and peaceful in the daylight, compared to the hellish heat rising from the basalt rock valley it seemed an oasis of coolness. It was definitely a case of appearances being deceiving; the patch of desert was no less cool than a desert normally was during the day. Besides that, the term "patch" in this case was relative; the dune area in between the valley of basalt rock and the mountains off in th distance would take several days to cross on foot. Beyond that patch of desert, appearing as nothing more than a dark haze on the horizon, was a mountain range.

"That's the Conrad Range off in the distance," Meryl informed her. Poor Remembrance looked positively faint. Meryl couldn't blame her, judging distances in the desert was tricky, things often looked nearer or father away than they actually were.

"It's so far," Remembrance murmured faintly, her eyes wide and her expression dismayed.

"The towns we're looking for, are on the other side of the mountains," Meryl added.

Remembrance slumped over with the attitude of one having had the straw that broke the camels back.

"And that dune-sea in the center?" meryl continued. "It's on top of an underground aquifer that's volcanically active... so that means that not only is it open desert, but there's sand-spouts, geysers of superheated water that can boil a man alive in under a minute. There is some luck about that though..."

"What's that?" Remembrance asked with tired dejection.

"The presence of the geysers means that there are no sand-worms in the area."

"What's a sandworm?" Remembrance asked next. Meryl looked at her blankly. Who hadn't heard of a sandworm? Everyone knew about them! They were the precautionary tale that mothers told their children to get them to behave, and they were always being featured on the sat-feed news as having eaten someone or destroyed a caravan or something. they were nominally considered to be one of Gunsmokes biggest menaces.

"Wh-" Merly looked at her in shock. "Everyone knows what sandworms are! What, have you been hiding under a rock for your whole life?"

Remembrance looked at her for a long moment and said

"I don't actually know a whole lot about this world Miss Meryl. I guess you could say that I have a sort of amnesia, I don't remember the most basic things about surviving here that you probably grew up knowing."

Meryl looked at her in surprise, getting the strong feeling that there was a lot that she wasn't being told, but decided that she was happy to let others have their secrets.

"A sandworm," she said instead. "Is a huge creature indigenous to this world, sandworms are huge creatures that look vaguely like worms but their front end is full of teeth and they travel in herds underneath the surface of the dunes. An adult stretches for over four yarz in length."

"Yarz?" Remembrance questioned next.

Meryl stretched her arms out and aproximated a length.

"Oh! Yards!" she corrected in comprehension.

"That's the archaic way of saying it," Meryl said, giving her an odd look. "There's been a bit of a language shift over time, but anyway. They are predator/scavengers that sense prey by the vibrations in the ground, and they have been known to eat people, even large parties of them, on many occasions. They can swallow a person whole."

Remembrance just stared at her in disbelief.

"You're joking," she said at last, trying to laugh.

"Do I look like I'm joking?" Meryl replied. She bent to the task of putting together the packs so that they were well-balanced and nothing dug into the bearers backs. Remembrance joined her in her work, clearly not knowing what she was doing really but trying her best to help anyway.

"Are there any other dangers you want to tell me about before we get started?"

"Um..." Meryl said reluctantly. "That basalt valley is likely to be hunting grounds for grendels."

"Like from Beowulf?" Remembrance asked curiously.

"Sort of, not exactly. They just named them that, whoever discovered them was probably a literary kinda guy, before he was eaten anyway. Grendels hunt in packs of about two or three, from what I've read, I've never actually seen one before except in pictures and there was one stuffed on display at the museum of natural history in december city, they're big nasty scavengers mostly. They have tough armored plate hides and long limbs for running and climbing quickly over rocks. And more teeth than any self respecting creature ought to have."

"Geysers, sandworms, grendels, dehydration, any other ways we can die on this trip you want to warn me about."

"Snakes, barevi thorns and sand-crocks too," Meryl said with a mirthless smile. "Just so you know."

"That's great. I must be out of my mind."

"No, if you stayed here, then you'd be crazy. Any or all of those things only might kill us, if the ones who took us backtrack and find us still here, they'll definately kill us. So let's get going."

Remembrance sighed, and coaxed what was apparently her charge into standing on her feet and allowing Meryl to tie the sand-cape around her shoulders over her wings and then add the burden of the supply pack carefully in between her shoulder blades.

"I never caught her name in all of this," Meryl remarked as she showed remembrance how to wrap the make-shift cowl around her head and throat to help block out the worst of the dusty wind.

"We don't know if she has one, so we just call her Angelina," Remembrance said.

"Doesn't she talk?" Meryl asked next.

"No, not really. She never learned how. She's having trouble just learning how to exist on the outside and deal with things in real-time, language eludes her for now, but her bondmate says that she'll be able to pick it up in time. She learns quickly, it reminds me of the time I was teaching my boys how to talk."

"Ah," was all Meryl said. She really really did not want to go into the subject about bondmates, because she had the sneaking suspicion that she knew who the angel Angelina belonged to. Really, there was only one other person that she knew of that might be capable of it, and that only left the questions of if Angelina was here alone then where was her bonded... and why did Knives (presumedly) order the two women to be taken?

She simply busied her mind finding a suitable place to rappel from the cliff edge down to the basalt valley beyond. She didn't want to leave an easy trail for the one who would be following them to find so she dragged a lenght of cloth behind her to help brush away her footprints, in a little while the never-ceasing wind would do the rest.

She found a spot that was suitable and pulled the pitons from her pack, locking them into the basalt-granite of the cliff edge and pulling the required lengths of rope through the D-rings, and securing them. She called Remembrance over along with Angelina and used an old fashioned rope-harness (that she'd always joked was designed to give the worlds most atomic wedgie) arounf their waists and legs and then said

"I'll go down first, then you hook Angelina in by her harness and I'll lower her down. When she's down you can hook yourself in."

Remembrance nodded firmly and Meryl dangled over the edge and pushed off. In a few bounding leaps, she was down to the ground. She unhooked herself and gave Remembrance and all clear signal. A few moments later, Remembrance signalled back and Meryl began to quickly lower the silent angel to the rock floor. After she was safely on the ground remembrance hooked herself in and to Meryl's surprise rappeled down herself.

"Part of the training," she replied a touch smugly to Meryl's raised eyebrows. Meryl nodded once and only said

"We need to get as far away from here as we can before they come back. Luckily this place offers a lot of places to hide so they shouldn't be able to spot us. If you see the steamer or any movement above on the cliff, find cover and dig in. Pray we can hide from them if we can't outrun them. From then on we'll be moving under cover of darkness. It gets cold here at night, especially out in the desert, so it would be wise to keep moving to stay warm then, plus theres less a chance that someone will spot us."

Meryl didn't know what to say about keeping a lookout for grendels, from all she'd heard those things had noses like jackals with the limber climbing abilities of mountain goats, only with clawed paws for actually being able to grasp onto things to find purchase. A pity she didn't have a gun with her, she'd feel a lot safer if she did. meryl looked at the bow and arrow set she'd improvised, and despite the fact that her powers had reinforced it, it still felt to her like it was primative and woefully inadequate to the task. Still, it was all she had and it was better than nothing.

i'd still feel better with a derringer at the very least, she thought to herself. They might be small, and capable of firing only one shot at a time, but thier strength was sufficient.

She sighed, trying not to think of how far the distance was that she had to travel for even a hope of coming across civilized lands, and how very very meagre their supplies were.

"Lets go," she said resignedly.

X X X X X X

Knives looked on with disfavor at the young man who was supposed to have been his new tool, and was supposed to have been broken in spirit and pliant by now, but still looked back at him with his own mind behind his eyes. The young man was satisfyingly frightened of him, every time Knives approached he jerked away with a whimper of fear and remembered pain, but yet he would not do as Knives had ordered.

He couldn't figure it out, a few days in the sensory deprivation chamber had broken stronger men than he was and yet the creature still held out against him. He didn't respond to drugs, and any attempt on Knives' part to simply take control of his mind was met by an impenetrable sheild that even Knives for all his training and experience in the realm of psychic abilities could not break. So much for delicacy. Knives eximined the razor-edge of one of his feathered blades, it could split hairs right down to their protein bonds. It looked like Knives was just going to have to do this the old fashioned way.

"Master," a voice said softly from th edoorway where Knives was standing over his prize contemplating where to begin. he rather favored the application of thousands of tiny little paper-thin slits about a half-inch long all over the surface of the body, followed by a nice long dip in a salt-water solution. The cuts would heal cleanly and without a mark but the pain was excruciating. He hadn't known a man yet who had been able to stand against that treatment.

"What is it, Legato?" he said in an annoyed tone. "I'm working."

"The acquisitions you had ordered from your brother and the place where we found your new prize have been reported missing," the man replied with a deferential bow.

Knives snarled a little. He kept meeting with set-backs! First his brother, by sheer dumb luck, actually manages to defeat him, and now this! What next, those lowly human-slaves he'd ordered from the city would revolt? He forced himself into calm; it was nothing that couldn't be handled.

"Missing?" he questioned. "Were they taken?"

That would be just like his brother, to go haring after his pathetic little human servant, ignoring the orders Knives had given him. If that were so then he would make certain that his brother was ten times as sorry, when the time came.

"They escaped," Legato replied.

Knives scowled. Truly the incompetence of his new hirelings knew no bounds. Knives hated having to rely on the back-ups, their training was incomplete and their methods slip-shod. It appeared that even they needed adequate oversight. Knives ground his teeth together in annoyance, but saw no help for it.

"I will punish them for thier negligence in allowing themselves to be bested personally when they arrive. You will go yourself and collect those errant possessions of mine, preferably before they are killed by the desert."

"Understood Master," Legato bowed again. "Will you not require further assistance to launch the ark? Only for menial labor of course."

"Summon the Crimson Nail," he grumbled grudgingly. "Once you have found my brother's woman and the other two take them to the slave pens in the Yawning Wastes and hold them there with the others. I will launch the ark and meet you there before the next phase of the operation. Do not fail me."

"I would die before I would allow it, Master," Legato bowed.

"I know," he shooed him off.

Knives returned his attention to the little half-human that thought he could stand against him and examined the feathered blade in contemplation. One way or another, this creature would cease to be a setback.

* * *

**Thank you everyone for the wonderful reveiws for the last chapter, it was one of my favorites too. I'm glad you all liked it. Yeah, Kuro, I know the adictive power that is KH2 also, especially the part with Auron in it. "This is my story and you're not part of it!" coolness! Well, good ta have ya back. Nice little transition chapter here, please look forward to the next update!**


	25. Setting Out

Vash sat in the dust leaning against the side of a building, Milly was feeding the tomases nearby, and examined the black crystal tetrahedron he'd taken from the cave. Something about it troubled him. He scrutinized it minutely from different angles, trying to decipher just what about it made him so very uneasy. It looked harmless enough, an uneven tetrahedron approximately four inches in height and four inches wide at the base on its greatest span, made of opaque black glassy material that looked like flawless polished obsidian. Something about the stone made Vash uneasy, his instincts told him that he'd encountered this stone somewhere before and the experience hadn't been a good one for him. It was right on the tip of his memory, and as much as he wanted to jar it loose, he knew that trying to do so would take him to a place he went out of his way to avoid thinking about. Instead he sighed unhappily and climbed to his feet.

"What's the matter Mister Vash?" Milly asked, looking over at him from where she fed their beasts.

"If we're going to collect all of these pieces," he said. "We're going to need a faster way to get around."

Milly cocked her head to one side and Vash smiled a little for the first time since they'd gotten back.

"Luckily I know just the guy."

Bidding Milly to keep an eye out for trouble and not to go anywhere until he got back Vash made his way over to a sharp cliff that would give him an unobstructed view of the terrain for miles around. He'd get a better signal there. He'd only done what he was about to do once before, in the days after his meeting with Knives at the city of July. It wasn't particularly dangerous, it was just that he preferred to handle things on his own and not get other people involved in his troubles, but the Doc was more or less already involved. Besides, with the ship having crashed down to earth outside the town of New Oregon, the technologies there would sooner or later probably be ferreted out and sold piecemeal by profiteers on the black market anyway.

"Smoke 'em if ya got 'em, as Wolfwood would say," Vash muttered.

The thought of his trusted friend and comrade brought both a smile to his face and a sad pang to his heart. Vash tried to console himself with the fact that the man had chosen his own end and had died fighting on the path he believed in... but it didn't help much. Milly was, as always, Milly, but he could tell that she missed the reprobate priest desperately too. If there had been a way to bring him back he would have done it. It was a pity that he hadn't even gotten to bid a final farewell to his friend, but Meryl had already moved them out of the town before he'd woken up. He assumed that she'd seen to the final arrangements.

Vash shook his head to clear it of the reminiscences and turned his thought resolutely to the present. If he didn't get moving, Knives was going to get impatient and probably start harvesting more body parts in order to encourage his brother to move a little faster. Unconsciously his hand strayed to the necklace she'd given him for safekeeping, it lay quiet for now. It was strange, sometimes it gave out a low humming vibration like it was resonating in reaction to a wave that only it could pick up. It was another mystery, one that he had the feeling that Meryl herself didn't have any answers to.

"Just hold on a little longer," he murmured, mostly to himself, but somehow willing his message to get to her. He wasn't going to abandon her, especially not to Knives. He'd find the other pieces... somehow.

:_But how_?: he wondered to himself.

He had no idea where to begin looking. At least with this first peice, he'd had a place to start and he'd more or less been able to jury rig his way through to the hidden location. He didn't even have a place to start on those other peices. he just had to figure something out, if he didn't.... it didn't bear thinking of. he couldn't loose her this way, not again. He'd already lost Rem to his brothers plots and schemes and countless others, he couldn't loose her like this. He just had to figure out how to get those other peices.

He'd been reaching into his pocket to pull out the long-distance sat-feed communicator so that he could get in touch with the SEEDs ship that had crashed near New Oregon when his hand brushed against the black crystal tetrahedron. It practically leaped into his hand, the strange buzzing resonance it gave off was definitely palpable. Mystified, Vash pulled it out and looked at it. A smokey-grey light danced over the glassy smooth surfaces of its planes and angles, like ripples dancing over the water. Meryl's necklace jerked forcefully towards it, the feeling exactly that of two magnets being pulled together, an invisible force but definitely palpable. Vash set the black crystal down and pulled the necklace out from under his shirt where it rested safely next to his skin. A little warily he dangled the stone near the tip of the black crystal. The two stones, one white and one black, attracted to one another like two opposite ends of a magnet. Once the white stone touched the tip of the black one there was a sudden flare of light and the black crystal began to hover up turning slowly, like an object spun in zero gravity. It spun faster and faster growing steadily brighter, then suddenly there was a flash of light so bright that Vash had to cover his eyes for a second.

"What's that?" Milly called, running over from where she'd been keeping a look out so see if everything was okay. Vash looked down to see the tetrahedron had stopped spinning and was hovering in midair with a strong, brilliant beam of purest white light, like the beam from a lighthouse, was shining out of the tetrahedron into the horizon. Vash pulled Meryl's necklace away from it, afraid that he'd somehow damaged it, and when he did, the beam of light faded and was gone.

"What was that?" Milly asked, reaching where he was panting and out of breath but unconcerned as she saw that he was unhurt.

"I-I'm not sure," he said. "But it looks like we know the direction of our next destination and how we're going to find it."

A genuine smile of relief spread across his face, and was mirrored in Milly's. He had a heading, now all he needed was a ship.

Vash pulled the sat-feed transmitter out of his pocket and looked down at the tiny screen at the signal indicator, walking slowly round and round in circles, searching for the place that would get him the best signal, a moment later he made a small triumphant noise and pushed the buttons to call the ships com. Moments later he was answered by an unknown voice.

"Who's this?" he asked, his voice sounded a little rough, like he'd been sleeping. Vash quickly ran the time zones through his head and realized that it was about six or seven in the morning there.

"Um, this is Vash," he said apologetically to the poor man manning the com on night-watch. "I need to talk to Doc about a matter of transportation, but I can call back in a few hours."

"Oh! Nah, don' bother," the night-duty man said. "Doc keeps early hours y'know. I'll hail him on the link."

Vash waited a moment more and the raspy aged voice of the Doc came through the transmitter.

"Vash!" he said sounding pleased to hear from him.

Vash couldn't help smiling at the tone of his voice, he'd known the Doc well before he became "the Doc." He'd been a young boy, afire with enthusiasm and ideals about how he was going to improve the communications network of Gunsmoke. Alfred Netter, later called "Doc" for his knack for being able to fix anything, had indeed, from his lofty place of origin, managed to make repairs and improvements on the ancient, failing communications satelite network in orbit around the planet.

"What can this old man do for you?"

"I need to borrow Ol' Bessy," Vash said, cutting right to the chase.

"Ol'Bessy?" Doc said, sounding puzzled. "Are you sure? No-one really knows how to pilot the old girl anymore."

"No-one except me," Vash maintained.

"Fuel might be a problem," Doc added. "She's got only one full nascell left, despite everything we've tried to do to horde it up over the years, and we don't have the means to replicate any more."

"It won't be a problem doc," he said. "Just get her here, and I'll take care of the rest."

"You ah... you and Knives have it out did you?" Doc questioned, trying not to sound like he was fishing for information.

"We did," Vash said. "I won the battle."

"Wonderful news! So you must need Ol Bessy to help you with a ride back here then?"

"Not exactly," Vash said, sighing a little. "I won the battle, but Knives is determined to continue to fight the war. He's made off with my friend and he's holding her captive. He wants me to gather up some sort of strange stone that's the key to something he wants very much to get his hands on. If I refuse, he'll kill her, probably slowly. I can't let that happen and I don't want him getting antsy, because I don't know what he'll take it on himself to do with her while he waits, so I need something that's going to get me where I want to go, quickly."

"I'll have the boys fire up the bird and we'll be on our way as soon as possible."

"Pack some supplies for us too will ya? I don't know what corners of the world this little quest is going to take us."

"Consider it done. It sounds quite exciting, I'll want to hear all of the details when I arrive."

"Sure," Vash said. The signal cut out and he turned to Milly.

"Well, I guess we should find a cool spot to wait while our ride gets here."

"I have breakfast set up on that porch over there," Milly said.

That was one thing he liked about traveling with Milly, she thought the same way he did.

X X X X

"Don't tell me you can't!" Meryl snapped completely without pity. "If you're still alive and you can still move, then you _can_!"

They'd stopped to rest in the shadow of a rock formation a long walk away from the place where they'd rappelled down the cliff and into the unknown dangers of the lands beyond. After having traveled for most of the night before, they'd been very tired and in need of a longer rest. Meryl had found a place for them to hide in shortly before dawn and they'd woken a little before noon. It was partly a rest so that Meryl could scan about for signs of pursuit and partly because, if Remembrance had to go another step, she'd thought she might die. The heat of the black sands at the bottom of the skree-slope at the base of the cliffs had absorbed and reflected the heat of not one, but _two _suns, heating the air at mid-morning to something akin to that of an oven. It made travel that she already was very much not accustomed to even more grueling.

Over the course of the previous night after their escape Meryl had turned into a ruthless taskmaster, practically force-marching her two traveling companions on for hours. She'd allowed a long rest for the two of them hidden safely tucked inside of a sand-blasted hollow in a basalt formation while she kept watch for trouble, but she'd woken them after the sunset had faded into twilight and two moons appeared in the sky over the eastern horizon. For Remembrance it hadn't exactly been a comfortable rest, she was accustomed to at least having something to cushion the hard sand-gravel ground into softness but all she had this time was a thick, tough woven blanket which Meryl had advised her to keep around her like a cloak to ward of the chill of the night.

And it had gotten _chill_. Remembrance had shut her eyes on an unbearable oven-like heat in the late evening and woke to a shivering chill in the early nighttime. It had gotten even colder as the night had worn on, though Meryl had kept them both moving so quickly under the light of the moons that they hadn't been able to truly feel cold for the brisk pace she set kept them heated up.

Remembrance had no objection to trying to escape what was clearly a dangerous situation, she had no objection to walking to keep warm at night, what she did object to was being forced to walk at the same pace during the incredible heat of the day.

"Get moving if you're going to!" Meryl called back, pausing, ostensibly to adjust the way her pack rode on her back.

"R-Right!" Remembrance called back, levering herself up from laying to sitting, and then slowly from sitting to kneeling, where she grabbed her pack and canteen and stowed them on her back, then finally she hauled herself to her feet and started after her traveling companion.

Meryl nodded approvingly as Remembrance pulled up alongside of her and said

"If you walk slightly behind and to the right of me, you'll get a little of my wake to take down the wind-push."

With that they set out together.

Remembrance had never in her long life of changes and great world-altering plans, ever imagined anything as horrible as that first trek through the desert. First there was the sun, there was not just one, but two of them, and the heat bore down on her back and the top of her head with an almost palpable weight. The punishing rays beat down on her like a hammer on an anvil, and the heat reflected from the light off the sand wrapped itself around her in a great, suffocating shroud. The air was so dry! It felt like it sucked the moisture right out of her body, and even though Remembrance knew she was sweating from the heat, her skin was hot and clammy, she felt like a dried-out shriveled thing left too long to bake in the heat. She wanted to pant, but the air was just so dry that every time she breathed in, it felt like her body had to actually cool the air to make it breathable.

On top of all of this was the never-ceasing relentless wind. As long as she lived, Remembrance didn't know how she was ever supposed to grow accustomed to it. It whined and moaned and murmured without pause across the sand of the dunes, bringing with it blasts of furnace heat that sought every nook and crevice in her clothes, no matter how small, to brush its relentless heat into. It bore with it grit and dust so fine but so... annoying! The grit wound up coating her mouth despite the cover she wore over it to breathe through turning the cavity that was supposed to be moist into a dry mud-cracked crevice on her face, just as parched as the sands around her. It found its way into her eyes, causing them to tear up every now and again, wasting precious moisture. She could feel the grit grinding into her skin, mixing with her sweat and coating her body like a second, unwelcome, skin. Remembrance thought she might go mad after a while.

"Here," Meryl said briskly. "I hadn't thought of it before, but these are good for beginners." Her cloth swathed arm reached out toward Remembrance, extending a pair of goggles at her. Remembrance looked at them at first in puzzlement, there was no water anywhere save what they had in their canteens, there was nothing to swim in!

"It'll keep the grit from the wind out of your eyes," meryl added a moment later.

"Oh," Remembrance said a moment later. "Um, thanks." It felt weird donning a pair of goggles and staying dry in them. She turned her back to the wind to wipe her eyes out and put them on. They didn't help with the heat or the dry, but at least her eyes did feel better. On the other hand, whenever she looked raised her head from being ducked down against the relentless unceasing wind the jutting sight of their destination looked as far away as ever. Meryl had promised them a good long rest at that rock formation up ahead.

"Are we really getting any closer?" Remembrance said in despair after what seemed like hours.

"Stop looking up at it," Meryl advised. "The desert can play a lot of tricks on the eye and mind out here in the sands. One of the most noted is distance. It has something to do with the heat haze and the way light travels. Anyway, your best bet is to keep your head down and keep walking in the same direction."

_Stoics! Oi!_ Remembrance thought in annoyance. Still, it was good advice.

"Will we reach it by dark, do you think?" she asked next.

"Probably not," Meryl said, immediately crushing her hopes of getting clean and fed and watered before she settled down for sleep with pitiless bluntness. "My advice would be to continue to travel as much as possible, even after dark. It may be hot now, but once those suns go down the temperature drops like a stone. You'll be glad of the movement to keep you warm."

"What about a fire and dinner?" Rem asked, unable to contain her hope. She was so tired! Just a little rest would be welcome.

"I wouldn't recommend a fire after dark, especially not with us traveling as we are," Meryl said cryptically.

"Wouldn't it keep the wild animals away?" Remembrance tried again.

"It's not the wild predators you need to worry about," Meryl said dryly. "It's the Human ones that are of greater concern. Fires out in the middle of unpopulated areas will attract them like a rotting corpse attracts scavengers."

"I-I don't..." Remembrance said, looking at her not in confusion but in disbelief.

_Surely not_! Surely Meryl wasn't saying what it sounded like she was saying. Meryl paused and looked over at her innocent traveling companion, her eyes gave no hope of jest, her face gave no leeway in the belief that what she spoke was anything less than true in this world.

"Slavers, Miss Remembrance. Sand-bandits too. Roving gangs of outlaws that prey on travelers. The ones who rob sand-steamers are positively civilized compared to what the ones that live out in the wilds do to people. Believe me when I say that being sold into slavery is not the least that can be done to an unprotected traveler, especially a woman."

Remembrance felt sick. Marcus had heard stories about things like that and he'd related a few of them to Remembrance over the short amount of time they'd worked together in an effort to tell her about the world they lived in, but that was all that they had ever been to him, stories. He'd lived safe and protected in his parent's estate, and even when he'd gone out to experience something other than his safe controlled environment, nothing really bad had ever happened to him. he'd gotten into a bar fight or two, watched a band of raiders get arrested and had then gone home. What Meryl was talking about were people who dealt in human flesh, who attacked other people just trying to make a living in this world, captured and subdued them, and then sold them to other people for money! And that wasn't the worst that could happen?! She didn't think she wanted to know the worst that could happen.

So, no fire then.

* * *

**For some reason, I like this chapter. It was fun coming up with the description of desert travel. Look forward to the next update please.**


	26. Resonance Burn

_She might not be Miss Congeniality_, Remembrance was forced to admit upon remembering just how quickly and efficiently that Meryl had not only planned the escape, but gotten thier packs assembled, thier canteens filled, and the three of them moving on their way after the escape. _But even if Meryl Stryfe doesn't seem to be much on socializing she certainly seems to know a thing or two about what it takes to survive out in this hell-pit._

Remembrance quirked an eyebrow at herself, recalling those conversations she'd had with Marcus Stryfe what his opinion had been of his older sister. It had been clear that, while he didn't seem to much care for his older sibling personally, he had to give her some credit. And now that Remembrance spent a day in the taciturn, stoic presence of the woman herself, she had to admit that so far her brothers assessment of Meryl Stryfe was spot-on; "She's not subtle, she's not pretty, and she'll piss a lot of people off... but she'll get the job done."

Meryl wouldn't accept anything less than one-hundred percent effort from herself, and everyone else around her. Remembrance found herself admiring her grit, as much as she was exasperated by her stoic nature.

:_Part of me does feel just a little bit sorry for her_,: Remembrance admitted to herself as she watched Meryl rub up and down her arms and look with irritation at their third traveling companion, Angelina. Meryl was walking as far ahead of and to one side of Angelina as she could get while still staying reasonably in sight, but it didn't seem to be helping the situation any.

It was clear to Remembrance that Meryl was suffering from Resonance Burn, that was the odd feeling that a budding or fully-fledged Resonant got from being around someone with a strong Psi-wave and not being able to protect themselves from it. While Angelina, because she was Bonded to Marcus had her own shields innately built in, a bit of her energy still managed to leak out despite that and it was clear that Meryl was picking up on it.

Resonance Burn, she'd been told of it back in the early days of the project. She'd had several very scathing descriptions of what it felt like. Some said that it was akin to someone running a mild current contantly over ones skin, not enough to hurt really but just enough to have a constant uncomfortable sensation. Others had described Resonance Burn feeling actually like a real burn, like sunburn. One particularly sensitive Resonant had said it felt like having a papercut and someone had poured saltwater in it.

Whatever it might feel like to Meryl, whether mildly annoying or outright painful, by the hard set to her lips and the way she ducked her head down, it was clear she didn't want to have to discuss it, wouldn't enjoy company, and was just going to take it like a woman thankyouverymuch. But she very much did not appear to be liking it.

:_Maybe some small talk_,: Remebrance thought to herself. Perhaps that would help take her mind off things. She quickened her pace a bit until she was up beside Meryl.

:_Now that I look at her, she's awfully small_,: Remembrance was surprised to note.

She was so confident and purposeful that Remembrance was continually purprised by just how small she was. It wasn't just that she was short, she was also slight as well, she reached just up to Remembrance's chin and less than that on Angelina and her little waist was such that it seemed like a high wind would take her. She probably wouldn't appreciate Remembrance pointing that out.

:_Marcus did say she had a personality that was prickly as a cactus and about as fun as a wet blanket_,: Remebrance thought to herself.

However, Remembrance wasn't exactly certain she could trust everything Meryl's little brother had said about her, for one thing, Remembrance got the feeling that the young man had been a bit of a rake-hell and Meryl had struck her right off the bat as being very by-the-book. Much of her brother's disparaging remarks about his bossy overbearing older sister could be nothing more than the dislike of two people who were so very different.

"So what is it that you do for a living?" Remembrance asked.

The distraction of conversation might make the dessert easier to bear.

"I work in insurance," Meryl replied.

Remembrance blinked. "Office worker" didn't really seem to fit the tough ready to take on the desert and rescue her little brother image that Remembrance had formed of Meryl in the short time she'd known her. The woman had figured out a way to bust them out of prizon, she had bluffed her way into forcing a guard to take them back down to the planet surface, she hadblown up the craft they'd landed in using nothing more than the remains of the fuel tank, a rag and a magnifying glass and she was now pushing them through the burnig desert in search of a safe hiding place; all without turning a hair. As if she did such things as a matter of course every day! Remembrance had thought that for certain the woman must be some kind of Ranger or something like it. But... she worked in insurance? She was a paper-shuffler? Everything that Remembrance knew about insurance pointed to there being a lot of paperwork involved, filling out forms, filing things in triplicate and the like.

"You...? You work in insurance?" Remembrance thought she might be having a joke at her expense. She pretty much expected that Meryl would turn to her and say "gotcha, of course not! Do you see how I got us out of prison so fast? What kind of insurance worker could do that?"

"Yes," Meryl said instead. "I work for the Bernardelli Insurance Society, based out of the Second City of December."

Remembrance stared at her for a long minute.

"You carry fifty-billion little guns on you," she stared in disbelief. "You bust out of prison, take down guards, you can fire a gun with your feet, for heavens sake, and you expect me to believe that you're a paper-shuffling bureaucrat?"

Meryl looked back at her in surprise and then smiled in amusement.

"Well when you put it like that, it does sound pretty hard to believe," she said. "But I'm sort of a very special kind of insurance worker. I'm in risk prevention; to be precise I am a Class A-1 Disaster Investigator!"

There was absolutely no mistaking the pride lacing her tone at that announcement. An announcement is what it was too, Meryls spine straightened from where she had bent in againt the wind and her shoulders drew back as if she were heralding the king.

"So you, investigate disasters?"

"Basically," Meryl said. "They send me, and my partner Milly Tompson, out into the Outlands to try to mitigate damages. Most of what we do is risk prevention though if the case we are assigned to makes a mess we get to fill out the paperwork."

Her expression darkened with annoyance at that last. But Remembrance wasn't quite understanding what she meant by "risk prevention." Just how did one prevent a force of nature?

"I got that you investigate disasters, but... well what can you possibly to to prevent one? Walk out into a sandstorm and wave around a big red and white sign with the word stop on it?"

"Oh, there's nothing to be done about natural disasters," Meryl clarified. "Milly and I handle humanoid natural disasters." She sounded like she was laughing on the inside about something, there was a definate gleam in her eye and a quirk about her lips that spoke of supressing a smile.

"Some people are so much trouble, and cause so much property damage wherever they go, that it makes the Company's premiums go through the roof whenever he rolls into town and starts trouble. So, Mister Bernardelli struck upon sending out a few select agents after these people that cause property damage and put them under twenty-four hour surveilance to try to prevent them from causing more damage."

Yes, that was definitely a smile on her face.

"By whatever means necessary," she added.

Remembrance sort of worried about the kinds of things that might make a woman like Meryl smile. But, at the same time, it sounded like there were some good stories there, and Remembrance would do about anything right now just to get her mind off the suffocating heat of the desert.

"Have you had many people you've put under surveillance?" she asked next. curiously. The was a world rather a lot outside of her pretty-much peaceful life of study and scientific research.

"Three of them, all totaled," Meryl supplied.

"Were they dangerous?"

"Yes," she admitted. "But it's my job."

"Why not just put them under house arrest or something?" she asked next.

"Not my place," Meryl replied. "I'm not an officer of the law, I'm an insurance worker. My job is to mitigate damages."

"It seems like they'd do a lot less damage if they were kept out of the way."

"Two of them weren't outlaws, so there was nothing to be done about them. They did eventually settle down, after I got through smacking some common sense into them."

"And the third?" Remembrance asked.

A peculiar look overcame Meryls face, Remembrance wasn't quite certain how to define it. She was clearly struggling to maintain a neutral non-chalant expression, but her cheeks seemed to be turning pink. Was she blushing? But she looked exasperated too, and there was some kind of funny look in her eyes, not quite "soft" but not her usual "all business" demeanor either.

"There's just no hope for him," Meryl dismissed with a casual shrug of her shoulders. Her tone was deliberately light and uncaring, but Remembrance knew a bluff when she saw one. Meryl was trying to get Remembrance to not want to know about it, so that was exactly the subject Remembrance was going to pursue. besides... if the first two weren't outlaws, then that meant that the third one was!

"Did the third one settle down too?" she asked next.

"No, I am technically still assigned to his case. I just got caught up in other matters. As soon as I get my brother and you back together and make sure you're okay I'll be rejoining my partner on my case. The chief will just have to accept my absence as an emergency situation. Milly's still with him right now so I'll just have to trust her to handle things for a while."

She sounded a little dubious about that last.

"So what about yourself?" meryl asked, changing the subject and turning the tables on her. She clearly didn't want the lady inquiring any further into her current assignment.

"What about me?" remembrance replied.

"What do you do for a living?"

"I'm a botanist," Remembrance added simply. "I study plants."

"Wow. Good luck with that one," Meryl said dryly. "Not a whole lot of call for botonists here on Gunsmoke, you must work in a geo-plant then."

Remembrance was content to let her assume so, if it was the most logical answer for her. Certainly she wasn't in the mood the tell the woman the truth, and Meryl seemed to be under the mistaken impression that her kind was supposed to Bond with regular humans, Remembrance could only assume that that was because her father had Bonded to a regular Human. It was a little ironic that Meryl knew how to use her abilities and yet was ignorant of her true purpose, but her brother marcus knew thier true purpose but was ignorant of his abilities. By all evidence, Meryl wasn't exactly keen on the idea of embracing that hidden aspect of herself, rather the reverse in fact.

Another interminable hour or so on their march Rem got tired of listening to that damed wind make the dunes murmur so she said

"You're another Resonant, just like your brother, right?"

"I am," she admitted reluctantly. "But unlike Marcus, i've chosen to remain human. I'm unTransitioned so that I'm in no danger of having to Bond off. I will live and die as an ordinary woman when my time comes. That is my intention, that's what I've decided."

"One thing I don't understand," Remembrance said into the quiet. "Your father Bonded off to a Psi, right? Then why wasn't he Transitioned over?"

Meryl frowned, firstly because the subject clearly wasn't a very comfortable one for her, but more importantly because Remembrance seemed to have struck upon something that she hadn't considered before.

But it's no surprise she hadn't thought of it, Remembrance thought with a small feeling of pity for the young woman that she was bound not to appreciate. Meryl probably had thought about her father or anything to do with him in many many years, likely not since his death or perhaps even before then.

Remembrance had gotten the bare gist of Meryl story from Marcus, meryl's brother (now Angelina's Bondmate). Their two fathers had been brothers, which meant that both of the two of them had been born carying a latent strain of the Resonant DNA axis in thier blood. The two fathers had had wildly different veiws on what should be done about the Resonant gifts they had been born with. Marcus' father had felt that the entire concept of what they were was wrong and unnatural, especially the Transitioning and the Bonding aspect of it, so he had taken his son to be raised among normal people, ignorant of his heritage. Meryl's father on the other hand had felt that it was thier duty to embrace everything they were in order to find some way to help humanity to survive on this world. He had joined up with a bunch of Scientists in a research center and let them run all sorts of tests and experiments on him to try and figure out what he did. From everything that Meryl had told Marcus about years later, apparently the scientists had discovered that the Resonants were able to resonate with energy-producing Psi-waves and channel vast amounts of energy through thier meridians, manipulating the bonds of molecules to create any combination of elements and compounds from a collection of hydrogen atoms, while bypassing the massive energy burts when a conventional molecular merging was made (such as the hydrogen-into-helium mergeing that made the suns in space burn).

Unfortunately for Meryl's father, the scientists were unaware of the true nature of Plant Angels, that they were a semi-created lifeform that had been made to produce massive amounts of psycho-kinetic energy, Psi-waves. basically, they were like Psi-wave dynamos. if they had known that they would likely never have tried Bonding her father off to a Human Psi, a stable level five at that, and seeing what they could come up with. Her father had been Bonded off and the first ever successful Bonded Pair quickly began research on what they had hoped would be the salvation of humanity. meryl hadn't known what that was, not surprising considering that she was very young at the time all of this was going on, the only thing she was really aware of was that one day it had all come crashing down. Whatever work they were doing with the Bonded pair had resulted in such a massive energy drain on the Source that she'd burnt out and died. Marcus said that even tring for her best stoic face, meryl hadn't been able to completely wipe to sorrow of the tragedy form her eyes when she'd told him about its effects. her father's life had been spared, but he'd been condemned to a brutal half-life that wasn't living. Meryl called it the Lingering.

Marcus hadn't been to clear on what had happened next, mainly, he said, because Meryl had refused to go into the details. Meryl's father either committed suicide or had simply wandered off one day out into the sands where he was presumed dead. Meryl had been sent to live with her heretofore unknown aunt and uncle, and her new brother, her cousin Marcus. The events that followed after this sea-change in her life Marcus had gone on about, at length.

Mister and Mrs Marcus Stryfe, a well-to-do and normal couple with ambitions to high society and a certain amount of political power, had given birth to thier only son with the idea that he would add further shine to their name and be a cachet of praise and glory; however, Marcus had been born with a lackadaisical streak that his mother had lamented (and nagged) him about from as far back as he could remember. He'd never wanted to do any of the average things that a boy of their society was expected to do, he'd hated academic studies, he'd loathed "being put on display" as he called it; his parents had wanted a perfect trophy child and had instead gotten a red-haired ball of noise and mischeif who'd liked to play his music too loud and invent new ways of bringing out the devil. He'd always found better things to do than to attend to his studies and get the excellent grades that his parents could brag about to thier peers, he was no-where near the top of his class, was uninterested in sports or activities, in short, he was not what his parents were looking for in a son.

Then along came Meryl... She'd been demure, polite and well-behaved. Her grooming was impeccable; neat, tidy and well turned out. She was diligent and hardworking, and brought home the grades, accolades and acheivements that his parents had been hoping for in their son. She studied hard and brought home the top ranking on all of her tests. She was smart, determined and came to be universally admired for it. A single semester after their adoption of the girl she had become class representative of her class, the year following that, student council president. At last! here was the perfect trophy child that his parents had dreamed of having as thier own. Marcus had hated her immediately and intensely, and that dislike had not abated a whit from that day to this one. it didn't help that, a year older Meryl had treated her little brother like a recalcitrant little chit of a princeling who had been spoiled and overindulged by the adults surrounding him. She had taken it upon herself to act as some sort of nursemaid and watcher, dragging him out of whatever new and fun activity he'd found for himself to study for the test he had coming up in a few days, tracking him down when he'd snuck out of the house to raise a little hell and dragging him back home safe. In short, she'd taken it upon herself to act like his big sister.

Marcus had intensely resented the intrusion of his so-perfect big sister whom no-one would say a word against. he'd hated it when people had always insisted on comparing the two of them! "Why can't you be more like your sister?" was a common refrain that he grew nauseated with hearing. It really pissed him off when she helped him, unasked for. There were occassions when Meryl had bent the rules for his sake, to cover for him when he'd done something really stupid, and then she'd helped him clean up his mess as best they could and counted on her iron-clad credibility to handle the rest. He really really hated that.

The two of them were very different to start with, it was no surprise that Marcus would be so taken with the idea of Transitioning over and Bonding off. Meryl had warned him expressly and very very clearly against it. It would bring him only sorrow and heartache she'd told him, the Bonding was unnatural and should never be allowed. Meryl hadn't hesitated to use the world anti-pathetic. Marcus was of course drawn to the things that it could be used to do. He'd seen Meryl use it a time or two when there had been no other way to sweep things under the rug (and keep him out of possible juvenile prison) and wanted that power for himself.

Marcus was a young man for whom things had always come easily; he was shockingly intelligent (unfortuneately his intelligece wasn't always put to productive ends), a talented artist, an amazing musician, he could do anything he put his mind to with almost no real effort at all. Add to that list the fact that he had a very great deal of personal charisma, and people were drawn to him, and he was quite good-looking... well... Things were always easy for him and it had made him a bit spoiled; sure he was a nice young man who didn't know he was spoiled but-- spoiled just the same. He had never personally lost people close to him, had grown up nearly his whole life being sheltered and provided for on his family estate. He'd spent a great deal of his time and preoccupation rebelling against authority. That was part of the reason, Remembrance thought, that he might have sought out a Bondmate in the first place; he wanted to break one of the greatest rules of his father's house. The rule where Transitioning over and being Bonded was forbidden.

Remembrance could see just from the way Meryl looked at her and Angelina that this was a complication she really didn't want. She'd made it abundantly clear that she was not at all happy with the fact that her brother had chosen to Bond off, and that she thought he would have nothing but greif and suffering from it.

"I can only assume," Meryl said after a very lengthy pause to mull over the question Remembrance had asked. "That it is because the woman he Bonded to was a low-level Psi."

"That makes no sense," remembrance argued. "In order to Bond off, a Resonant has to be already Transitioned over. Meryl... do you even know what Transition is?"

"It's been a long time since i thought about it," Meryl admitted reluctantly. "And I was very young when my father told me, but from what I remember when a Resonant Transitions over, they go from being human, to being something... other."

"And do you know what that "other" is" remembrance questioned next, gently. She could all but sense Meryl bristling with quills like a porcupine sticking out in all directions. She really really did not want to be having this conversation.

"No," Meryl said.

The ignorance in this little family group was appalling. Neither of them really knew what they were.

"Do either of you even know why you are different?" she asked next. "Or where it comes from?"

"After a fashion," Meryl said defensively. "Papa told me that our unique bloodline was the result of some kind of medical experiment done back on old earth. That's all I remember about it, and believe me after what I've seen that's enough for me to let it alone."

Remembrance looked at her retreating backside with dismay. it was clear to her that Meryl considered thier conversation done with and did not want to hear another word on the matter, but really, how in the world had she gotten so ignorant of her purpose in life. It was understandable that over time and generations, some information would be lost, but Remembrance would have thought that Marcus' and Meryl's ancestors would have remembered that their purpose was to save the world.

"I'll have to tell her about it, and soon," Remembrance murmured to herself. If things weren't at the point where matters were coming to a head then Remembrance herself and Angelina wouldn't be there. Events must be drawing to a close in this little opera.

* * *

**I tried to post a chapter on Saturday, I really did but FFN was not having any of my txt document formatting (yes, i use text, leemeealone). So I tried again on Sunday and it still wouldn't take it so I waited until I had today off then went through the long, boring process of copying and pasting all of my chapters into Word sheets. So annoying! Well anyway, I hope you all enjoyed and please let me know what you think!**


	27. Then and Now

He didn't have very long to wait, his double shadows cast by the sun had moved maybe seven inches when he heard the familiar high-pitched whine of the anti-grav turbines in the speeder off to his left from the east. His ears were keener than a humans so he picked it up before Milly, but it wasn't long before her head perked up and to the side and she cocked an ear listening and trying to identify the unfamiliar sound. it wasn't surprising that she didn't know what ti was, Vash would have been very surprised if she had known what the source of the noise was, there wasn't a whole lot of Lost Technology left lying around on Gunsmoke and to his knowledge, the speeder aboard the SEEDs ship was the only one still left opperational for a number of reasons; the technology itself was very difficult to replicate and maintain there on gunsmoke and it was far more economical (not to mention safer) to travel across the wild wastes of Gunsmoke in a steamer caravan. Most of the other speeders had been canabalized for parts and sold of piece by piece long ago. Vash was glad he had access to this one though, it meant that he could actually find and gather all eight peices of the keystone in a reasonable amount of time, and then he'd be able to get Meryl back.

A few minutes later the speeder was a rapidly growing speck on the horizon and Vash watched as Milly's eyes widened in amazement when she took it in. Ol'Bessy, despite the nickname, was in superb condition. Smooth and sleek, she was shaped roughly like a sunflower-seed in the front, widening out in width and depth smoothly until it resembled more of a stylized bird-like shape. The smooth prow of the ship cut through the air, the wind gliding smoothly back towards the plas-glass cockpit where the ship widened out with two large wing-like spaces on either side and a taller compartment behind the cockpit. There were smaller navigational thrusters to the aft on either wing with the anti-grav hover-turbines on the underside, and a primary thruster in the very back, behind the engine room. The ship pulled up smoothly, slowed and "landed," as in, it hovered in a stable position before them and the engines cut to a very very soft, almost imperceptible hum, and a moment later the wizened old man that Alfie had become opened up the landing hatch and stepped out of the ship onto the sands.

"Wow!" Milly exclaimed, looking at the ship, which really was quite sizable compared to say, a tomas or Wolfwood's bike. "Are we going to ride around in this?"

"Sure are big girl," Vash replied. "It was the fastest way I could think of to get to where we're going, and the sooner we gather the pieces of the Keystone, the sooner we can get Meryl back."

Milly didn't say anything, but Vash could tell that she was trying to put on a strong front for him, and perhaps for herself. Vash felt terrible, Milly was going through a rough time, first Wolfwood dies, and now her protective senior gets taken away. Milly didn't say anything but Vash could tell that she partially blamed herself for Meryl's absence, there was always the feeling when someone survived something like that unscathed while something bad happened to someone close to them that there was something more they could have done to prevent it. Vash was intimately familiar with the emotion. Survivors guilt it was sometimes called. He had felt it on any number of occasions and many many different situations over the long years that he'd been looking for his brother. Vash himself was feeling a little of it now, having "let" Meryl get kidnapped despite all that he'd tried to do to prevent it. He also knew that nothing he could say to her would make her feel any better, and he also knew that if he tried to tell her trite things like it wasn't her fault she'd just try all the harder not to show how much she was hurting. Vash heard her on those nights when she thought he was asleep, trying hard to cry silently whispering to Wolfwoods ghost to keep a watch out for her sempai and protect her.

His hand strayed again to the little jewel that Meryl had given him to protect for her before she'd been taken. It lay quiescent against the flesh of the little hollow in between his collarbones; bloodwarm from the heat of his body and very comforting to him. He'd get her back.

"What's up Doc?" Vash called over, doing an impersonation of a now-unknown character from some old vids that Rem had let him an Knives watch as children. Vash had liked them, but Knives had always felt vaguely insulted about being subjected to them, feeling that Rem was treating him to something that was beneath his dignity. Vash knew that he'd secretly liked them too, but hadn't wanted to admit it. The joke was lost on Doc who, despite his access to the memory banks of the old SEEDs ship had never seen the old animated shorts.

"Vash!" he called, hurrying over.

Despite his advanced years, Alfie was still spry for an old man, and he moved with a brisk economy of motion of a man half his age, so, for though the wrinkles had gathered on his face and hands Doc was not a man to let a little thing like old age hold him back. His intelligence had suffered not a whit certainly, and if Vash had to have someone to ferry him around, he would like a second opinion of the strange patterns and events that were likely to happen on this upcoming little quest across the sands.

The three of them hurried out to the suffocating heat of the sands and mid-day and into the ship where Vash gave Milly a quick tour. The hatch opened onto a small cargo hold, whose shelves were stocked with supplies (and weapons) for the trip. At the wider end of the hold in the nose of the ship there was a door that led to the "residential" sector. A long narrow hallway ran down the middle of the ship, like a spine with two small short hallways leading off to either side halfway down the central hallway. Immediately to the right of the door was a small ladder that led up to the cockpit of the ship. There were two chairs seated behind a central console under a large windshield of plas-glass. The cockpit was pretty small, with room for the pilot and co-pilot and two others besides in a small row of seats behind the pilots seats. There was a door to the aft of the cockpit that led to a small room that had a built in on one side with a bed on top and a small desk/computer unit in the cubby beneath it, and a matching unit on the other wall with a small bay of windows and a table to eat at instead of a desk. At the very back of the room was a small floor hatch that Doc said led down into the engine room with a ceiling hatch that Doc said led out onto the top of the ship (for repairs). Down th ladder and back into the hallway that made the "spine" of the ship there were two doors on either side of the hallway, one door led to a small galley with a miniature kitchenette and the other led to a small lab with medical equipment in it and a long table with fixtures bolted to it for anylysis, dominating one wall was a huge display screen that showed a real-time veiw of the planets surface with the swirling patterns that indicated weather and various tiny sub-screens with data scrolling down them. Down the spinal hall and around the corner to either side along the wings of the ship were doors that led to guest bedrooms, though they were more like racks. Two sets of stacked bunkbeds lined the walls on either side each with storage in lockers at the foot of the bed and more storage in a compartment under the mattresses. The end of the "spine" hall ended in a single door which Vash said led strait to the engine room. They didn't bother looking in on it, for they were both anxious to get on their way.

"So," Doc said once they were under way. "What's the story?"

Vash related to his old friend everything that had happened to him since he had left the SEEDs ship crashed at last to the surface of the planet near New Oregon going through the loss of his friend Wolfwood, the incident with Legato (though he'd had trouble even getting the words out of his mouth), his battle with Knives and his decision to bring him back to heal and grow to like people... hopefully anyway. Then he reached the part where Meryl gave him the stone that was her precious keepsake from her father and Doc's eyes lit with interest.

"May I see it?" he asked.

Vash recalled how reluctant Meryl had been to part with it, and took also thought to how strangely it had been reacting at times and his first impulse was to decline but then he thought better of it. Meryl's father probably hadn't had the advanced technology that this little ship had for anylyzing new materials, after all it had been a small four-man scientific explorer vesel at one point (or it was supposed to have been). Not only was Vash curious about this stone that Meryl's father had discovered, he found that it sometimes made him a little uneasy and he'd feel better knowing that there was nothing about it that was going to come round and bite him in the butt.

:_Plus_,: he thought to himself suddenly recalling the way that it had reacted to the peice of the keystone tetrahedron. :_It think there's more to the situation than meets the eye. I wonder why it did that.:_

"Let's look at it in the lab," he temporized, unwilling to part with the keepsake that he'd promised Meryl that he'd look after.

In the lab Vash unclasped the chain from around his neck and placed the crystal into the anylysis plate. The plate lit up from the underside and a transparent curtain of greenish-colored light surrounded it. The stone began to hover in midair. Two globes shot up from the table-side on either side of the analysis plate and hovered in circles around the object inside the analysis plate shining many different colored beams of light and razors, analyzing it down to its very molecules. A nearby panel lit up and data began scrolling down it in little sub-screens, the main part of the screen was taken up by a chemical-bond picture of what its atoms looked like.

The crystaline structure of the "energist" as Meryl had called it, was an octahedron with four outlaying silicon molecules and a large molecule of an unknown substance at either end. There were a number of holes in the picture, as if the computer had run across a substance that was not in any of its data banks and the screen zoomed in on one of the holes and began to construct a large picture of a proton-neutron core with a large number of electron orbitals in the cloud around it, then slowly the atomic mass, weight, structure and properties started showing up on the sub-screens. The polar shape and properties of the molecules lent itself well to chaining and storing energy. More detailed data began to show up, energy thresholds, properties and other information.

Doc stared at the screens with a rapt fascination, nearly pressing his nose to the screen in an attempt to get closer to the information and analysis.

:_Or maybe he's just old and can't see_,: Vash thought.

But a second look on the face of his old friend, his expression one of passionate intesity, the expression of a man whose found a new cause to devote himself to. Scientists! Vash shook his head at his old friend, knowing well that now that he had something completely new and unknown to study, nothing short of threat of death was going to tear him away from it.

"I'll just get us started on our way then," Vash said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out the piece of the Keystone. "And while you're at it, be a good man and humor me... you can analyze this too.

His only reply was a vague distracted grunt of acknowledgment from the doc. He probably hadn't even really heard him and was just making a noise to get rid of the annoying presence that was trying to distract him from his new toy. Oh well, he'd come out of his trance in a few hours and see the crystal there. Vash, just to be cautious, put it under a containment field as well, no sense in taking chances on it getting lost. It was the only way to get Meryl back without risking Knives killing her.

Vash strapped into the co-pilots chair and Milly took the seat beside him and after a few minutes of Milly fumbling with the various straps and buckles, Vash interrupted his pre-flight diagnostic and helped her figure out the more complicated harness that the seats of the cockpit used. After that, Vash conscientiously ran through a quick systems check, Ol' Bessy was in the best condition out of any explorer ship that Vash had ever run across, but she was still over a hundred years old, and old technology could be a little touchy at times. Vash didn't want to waste time trying to repair the vessel just because he didn't take the time to make sure everything was good to go before he took off.

"Anylysis complete," the voice of the VAS (voice addressing system) informed him.

"We good to go?" he asked.

"All systems primed," the computer replied.

Vash noted with some amusement that Milly was trying hard to hide her shock at being adressed by the ship. She'd probably heard the stories about how the old ships used to be able to talk but proabbly hadn't believed them.

Vash pulled up a nav screen and punched in the degrees, the ship hummed a little louder and to Milly's surprise began to rotate in place. The hum became a distinct whine as the engines prepared to move the ship on its way. Thier position relative to the ground rose as the hover engines increased their altitude and the ship finished orienting itself on the heading Vash had given it, then with a sudden jerk that sent them softly into the padded backs of thier chairs the ship sped off, angling towards its destination.

"Wow! So fast!" Milly marveled as the golden hot sands blurred swiftly beneath them. "This is going even faster than a sand-steamer!"

A sandsteamer moved at a snails pace compared to the rate that they were going, and yet, once their initial push was over with and they reached their cruising speed, they didn't feel a thing, not the pull of inertia and barely even the ever so subtle vibration of the engines. It was truly a piece of the long-lost wonderful technology that had borne their ancestors across the stars to crash-land on the tiny planet.

Vash smiled a little and accessed the ships stored refectory synthesizer and tapped in a request for pudding and donuts and drinks for the two of them. Millys eyes widened in shock and delight as the treats materialized inside a small casement off to one side of the cockpit. Vash tilted the seat back a bit and sipped on his non-alcoholic (the cockpit was barred alcoholic drinks from the ships synths while the ship was in motion) beverage. The donuts supplied by synth machines always tasted somewhat flat to him, but perhaps his tastebuds were just extra sensitive.

"Mister Vash," Milly said conversationally as they sped on their course and ate their snack.

"Hm?" Vash asked.

"How did you come to have sempai's treasure?" Miilly asked.

Vash blinked a little in surprise at hearing it referred to in that particular term by her best friend, he knew she valued the stone as a memento from her father but he hadn't thought that she prized it quite that highly. Taken that way, the fact that she'd given it to him to take care of indicated a greater level of trust and feeling than he'd thought at first.

"She gave it to me to take care of when we went down into the caves together," Vash said. "She was afraid that it might get lost or damaged outside of her clothes."

Vash tried not to remember or think about how good she'd looked out of uniform. That tank top! Oi! And those shorts! He'd been unprepared when she'd emerged from her rooms wearing a great deal less than he was accustomed to seeing her in. Usually Meryl was very primly and properly covered from neck to toe in boots, thick hose (to keep out the sand), proper office skirt, and two, count 'em _two_, layers of shirts, an office blouse and an overblazer with its neat, militant rows of buttons. He wasn't accustomed to seeing any more flesh than her face and hands, and suddenly he gets those smooth shoulders with delicate collarbones and slender arms like two willow branches. Cleavage! He'd seen actual _cleavage_! If she'd caught him staring, she'd have been mad, but Vash had unobtrusively found angles as they were walking and climbing that would aford him veiws that a man could die happily fantasizing about. And those legs! God she had _great _legs! He might tease her about her height, but no-one could say she didn't have a great shape to go with it. Nice, curvy hourglass figure, shapely legs, nice bust. It actually made him kinda glad that she wore all those clothes and that intimidating demeanor that tended to put men off when they first met her, that meant there was less competion for _him_.

He scowled momentarily thinking about the kinds of rough handling of her person she was likely under-going at the indifferent hands of his brothers henchmen. They'd better not touch her. If they did...

His thoughts trailed off. He'd _what_, exactly? He wouldn't kill them, and torturing was something he definately could never bring himself to do. Willingly inflicting greivous harm on another person while they were still conscious, and not in the interests of healing them but in order to make them do or say what you wanted? No, Vash shuddered, sickened at the thought. He could never countenence such a thing.

His brother however had no such qualms.

Vash felt another flash of boiling hot anger flood his system in a crimson wave once more as his thoughts touched again upon the image of her delicate severed finger lying there, frozen, in its bed of cryo ice framed by the mist of the freeze box. Deep inside that dark other presence made of all the suppressed rage and anger directed toward the world and the one who tormented him stirreda little and tried to awaken fully adn vash very quickly turned his thoughts to something else, willing himself to calm down and not be angry. It was hard, harder than it had ever been before for him to turn aside his anger. Killing Legato had broken something inside of him.

Killing Legato had broken something inside of him. Like the old legend of pandora's box, that single act had unleashed something inside of him, something dark and terrible that he'd kept sealed away and now it was loose; still sleeping, but roused at the slightest provocation... and Knives was determined to give him more than a slight provocation. Vash wasn't certain that he could control himself anymore. He felt like he was balanced on a delicate thread, and the slightest movement would break it and he'd go falling down into a place he didn't want to be. it was also part of the reason why he was so desperate to get her back. Certainly he was worried about what might happen to her in the untender care of his brother who would not hesitate to hurt her, possibly even kill her, if his brother did something that Knives didn't like, but there was also the feeling that having Meryl under constant threat of harm was partly responsible for the ever-simmering pot of anger in the back of his mind.

After everything that had happened to him Vash had more than enough reasons to be angry, but in the end he'd truly wanted to help his brother. He'd just wanted a little peace, and he'd wanted his brother back, so he'd been willing to forgive Knives his plots and schemes, he'd known deep in his heart that Knives was just scared and he'd even been willing to forgive the incident with Legato that had put his heart through so much agony, after all, he'd had someone to help him pull through.

Vash recalled clearly how he'd been lying in bed, his heart a yawning pit of despair. He'd failed Rem, he couldn't hear her words. He'd lost her way. It was as if the world had ended and yet, like a true creature that lived outside of time he was left to continue on in a barren wilderness without voice or guidance. He'd screamed out his pain and anguish, beseeching the spirit of the woman who had guided him through all of his previous torment and sorrow to forgive him for his sin and guide him once again, to tell him how he was supposed to make it right, to help him find the way that she had promised him. There was no answer, only silence. He'd only been able to be aware of his pain and its was a sensation far more physical than the ache in his body from the wounds he'd suffered. He was all alone, bereft, far more than even on that day when he'd lost her and the kind brother he'd once known had been replaced with some kind of demon wearing his brothers skin. he hadn't known how he was supposed to ever be able to face another day with the pain he'd felt. he'd just wanted to at last give in to despair, to roll over and die. To at last rest and just let it all end. And yet...

Yet in his deepest moment of despair he'd _felt _something. Something that penetrated the deep, dark pit of anguish, despair and hopelessness that he'd been surrounded by, a kind of strength. For the first time Rem's voice was silent but he heard another, just as kind, just as beloved.

:_I know my words won't reach you, and maybe I can never understand what you've been through, but if you have to give up on yourself, at least let me help you, as I couldn't help **him**. I can't fail again, I couldn't bear it_!:

Vash had quickly realized that the voice he was hearing was Meryl. He could feel her presence just beyond the door. Normally he would have immediately sheilded against her, especially now, when all he'd wanted to do had been to find a deep dark hole to bury himself, sealing himself away from humanity, and just let death find him there. But he had been through so much and his defenses were down, so in spite of his resolve to let it all end, he'd listened.

He'd more than listened, every shield he'd ever possessed had been robbed from him by his decision to kill Legato, it had been the foundation of his entire being and now it was stripped away from him. He'd had literally _nothing _with which to defend himself. So when he'd listened in on Meryl, he'd gotten _more _than just her thoughts. For a breif instant it had been like he had **BECOME** her. He could feel himself standing outside the door to his room, the rough wood of the door against the palm of one hand while the other clutched at a hard lump of something beneath his clothes at his... wait, _her _chest. He'd/She'd been shaking, his/her knees holding him/herself rigidly upright while he'd/she'd resonated helplessly with this great yawning darkeness, this despair that devoured will and strength and hope, love, kindness and grace, leaving only a bleak empty unquenchable nothingness in its wake. He'd/She'd felt the memory of another who had felt this same pain. One she hadn't been able to save, one who had given in despite her meagre attempts to comfort him. She had failed in her watch the first time but she wouldn't let it happen again. She'd been a child then, but she was stronger now. He felt her close thier eyes and seek that calm, steady center of ice, steel and lightning within her and had felt her will it outwards beyond the bounds of her fleshly shell and into him.

Vash had found himself suddenly back within himself, but the darkness which had been so all-consuming only a moment before, seemed to recede a bit. It was like there was an invisible wall, a shield protecting him from the dragon of despair coiled round him waiting to devour him. Slowly, a subtle warmth seeped in, reminding him that there was still light in the world. Steel straightened his spine a little, ice numbed away the worst of the pain and lightning revived his heart.

:_I know it seems impossible to go on, but I won't fail you. I'm still here_.:

Her thoughts led to a mental recitation of some poet she'd read over and over again to comfort her in her own hours of despair, when's she'd lost the one closest to her. They'd been a comfort to her and an entreaty to someone else.

If some voice that man could trust

Should murmur from the narrow house,

'The cheeks drop in; the body bows;

Man dies: nor is there hope in dust:'

Might I not say? 'Yet even here,

But for one hour, O Love, I strive

To keep so sweet a thing alive:'

She couldn't remember the rest, but that had been her favorite line. She'd tried to reach _him_ (Vash wasn't sure who she meant all that he'd been able to pick up from her mind had been a nebulous male presence) but he hadn't been able to hear her words long ago, and would not accept her strength. In the end, his pain had stood on its own, even though she had felt it with him. The ghost of her father seemed to be echoing back within her at the sight of Vash's own pain and anguish.

:_I guess we all carry our ghosts with us, such is the way of things_,: Vash thought to himself sadly.

It made him sad most days how tragedies seemed to repeat themselves in various ways, and how everyone always seemed to carry them on their own. Meryl was a special woman in the fact that not only had she continued on without flinching from something that, as the story she had never spoken of or even hinted at in her past unfolded, Vash knew she must have been carrying a deep wound inside herself, but she had refused to let it defeat her. Not only that, but later on in life she had been able to use that pain to help another who needed her. She was made of strong stuff, great men had been broken by less but not her. He wouldn't let Knives steal her from him, this time he was going to protect her.


	28. Tennyson

She tried not to look too worried as she sloshed her canteen from side to side. It was already lighter than she wanted it to be, despite her controlling herself with a will of iron. There hadn't been that much to start with, just whatever she'd been able to scrounge from what was left in the bottom of the emergency rations before they'd abandoned the half-steamer by the side of the cliff. She wasn't sure how much Remembrance or Angelina had left of their water rations but she was sure that it couldn't be much. They wouldn't be able to make it through the desert on under two liters of water, they still had days of foot travel left to go.

"What are we going to do about water?" Remembrance asked in an echo of her thoughts. She had probably seen Meryl testing her canteen and finally found the courage to voice the concern that was probably weighing on her own mind.

"I don't know," Meryl said with reluctant honesty. "I don't know of any wells or springs near here, and even if we were to find one there's no guarantee that, this close to the Mcllilian Mineral Flats, it would be drinkable water."

"Will we be able to find help in under three days?" she asked next.

The two of them held thier conversation in spurts as they guided around natural trails in the rough terrain, climbed over rock formations they couldn't go around, and navigated paths that a mountain goat would have hesitated to take on. All of this in the blistering oven-like heat of air superheated by the suns rays striking on the ground.

"No," Meryl said, still being honest, even though she really didn't want to.

It was just one more instance of the truth hurting.

"We're out in the middle of no-where, and there's not a trace of civilization around for miles."

"What about nomads?" Remembrance asked hopefully.

"Better hope that we're the only people we run across. The kinds of people who are likely to inhabit this sector are people we don't want to have to meet, if you catch my meaning."

"You mean, like bandits?" Remembrance said.

"Or worse," Meryl replied.

"We're out in the middle of the desert, running out of water... why?" the young woman asked, clearly tired and worried and at the limit of her patience. "I only have your say-so that those people we escaped from meant us any harm at all."

"And the fact that they kidnapped you and locked you in a kennel," Meryl snapped heatedly.

She could have just left her there, but no, she does the right thing and wakes her up and helps not only her but her winged companion escape and now she's being complained at about it.

"I'm just saying that you don't know what their plans were and didn't bother to find out. And now we're traveling through the desert with no hope of rescue, running low on water with no way to resupply. We'll die if we don't find a new source of water which is more than I can say for what might have happened to us in the care of the ones who took us."

"There are things that are worse than death," Meryl muttered darkly. "I don't have the inclination to play the blame game with you, if you want to go back, turn around and head back to the steamer, I'm sure the hunt will be more than happy to pick you up. I'm going to keep going."

"You say that now, but you just admitted that don't know how to find water, you'll die of thirst."

Meryl debated saying something dramatic about how she'd rather die free than live in chains but promptly checked the urge, instead she settled for a simple

"I've survived situations just as bad as this. Remember that even if it is volcanically active, the dune-sea near here has a trickle of the water table running under it, that's how they get geysers. We'll find a way to harvest that water."

:_One way or another_: she promised silently.

Even if it meant using her powers to freeze and condense what was probably nothing more than sand-laden steam, if that was what it took to survive then that was what she would do.

:_We're an odd team to try and cross the desert_,: Meryl thought to herself.

Out of the three of them she seemed to be the only one who knew what she was doing. Miss Remembrance didn't seem to know anything about the desert at all which led Meryl to wonder about her origins. Was she city-bred? If so she would have mentioned which city by now. Was she from some weird religious commune? There had been a number of them to spring up in the first two or three decades after the Great Fall so it wasn't impossible, some of them were the definition of isolationist but Meryl didn't think that was it either.

:_Maybe she's been hiding under a rock her whole life_,: Meryl dismissed it with a shrug.

Either way, Miss Remembrance clearly knew nothing about life in the desert and what it took to survive. That was just _great_, she was stuck on a nasty survival hike with a wet-eared greenie. Just great.

:_And if that wasn't enough I have to put up with Angelina and that awful vibe she puts out_!: Meryl thought, irritated all over again.

It was maddening! And she couldn't get away from it!

:_It feels like someone grating their nails over a chalkboard... only its all over me_!: Meryl thought, twitching again.

Not that Angelina wasn't pretty, even beautiful, in a weird kind of way. Her face was beautifully formed, perfectly symmetrical; even, smooth features of palest marble as though carved by a master craftsman on the search for True Beauty... but there was just something so _alien _about her. Her perfect features were a little _too _perfect, there were no flaws, no character. Her eyes had no irises and pupils but were instead rounded slits in her face filled with blue-white light. Her skin glowed, ever so softly, even in the light of day, with a soft white luminescence, like she'd swallowed one of the moons and it shone out through her body. And her wings... they were beautiful. Folded neatly over her back they fell in a cascading curtain of feathers of the purest white that Meryl had ever seen. It was a white so pure that it seemed to take all the light that surrounded it and reflect it in a silvery-white aura, a majestic purity that made one feel almost humbled to be in its presence.

Meryl would have been far more pleased to be in the angels presence if that presence were not so annoying. The constant tingle-burn under Meryl's skin was maddeningly distracting and it put her in a constant state of irritation. It made what would have other wise been a merely grueling trek across the open wastes into something that was akin to torture!

"How far away is the dune sea?" Remembrance asked next, obviously making an effort not to sound plaintive.

Meryl approved of her attitude, she was no Milly, but Remembrance was made of some good stuff, Meryl could tell. She was just, for some inexplicable reason, unfamiliar with the terrain and dangers she found herself faced with.

"Two nights travel," Meryl said. "I'm only traveling by day now to get some distance. We'll grab a rest near the second suns setting, and wake up at third moonrise. That should give us enough time to recharge a little and we won't be taking too great a slice of time out, and if we're lucky, the air will have cooled off by then."

"Are you sure we can travel at night?" Remembrance asked, looking around them.

The crags and bends in the rocky basaltic earth folded up in ridges like someone had carelessly bunched up a blanket and left it to lie there. The ridges weren't nice rounded folds either, there were cracks and splits and seams with sharp edges in the dense crust that were certainly no picnic to try to manuver over. And then there were the rocks and loose gravel, to say that it was rough was an understatement; worse than sandpaper, you could probably use a basalt stone to strip the paint off aluminum siding. The gravel was sharp and jagged, not quite as bad as glass but not smooth as sand either. Remembrance had already discovered that one catch on a stumble in this terrain would leave the heel of a hand stripped of the upper epidermis and bleeding.

"Three moons will give off plenty of light to see by," Meryl reassured her. "And besides, traveling the basalt Valley in the daytime will only increase the amount of water we sweat out. At night, it's cold enough to where you don't sweat as much because you're trying to retain heat and your body has a much easier time conserving water."

Remembrance must have seen something in Meryl's face, for she grabbed her arm and turned her to face her.

"Alright. What is it?" she demanded flatly.

Meryl had managed to be unobtrusive through out most of the day, keeping a weather eye on the horizons around her, her senses alert to the tell-tale change in pressure and temperature, and ears open for that slight shift in the pitch and direction of the winds as they whipped across the basalt formations. She hadn't really _wanted _to tell Remembrance this but her long experience as an insurance disaster investigator told her that there was another reason why a volcanic hot-zone (normally a place ripe for colonization because of the abundance of minerals, raw materials and most importantly, geothermal energy) had no people in it was because of the unique coincidence of the terrain features thereabouts.

Air that had been super-heated over the basalt valley met with the relatively cooler air from the nearby desert and mountains... creating ideal conditions for the _mother _of all storms. The other thing that particular area was known for was the ferocity of its sandstorms, they were called The Midnight Kamiseen. Black sands whipped up by the winds into a cloud so dense that they litterally blocked out the sun, the world was blanketed in a darkness to thick that it was as if it were nighttime. That wasn't all. The sand-laden winds of the Midnight Kamiseen traveled at speeds that could strip concrete. Any poor unfortunate soul caught out in them would find thier skin quickly flayed from thier bodies, if they didn't suffocate first that was. The sand in the air was so thick and was whipped around so quickly that even wrapping up in a cloth to filter the air had little effect. And there was ablways the chance that if you weren't flayed alive or suffocated by the winds, you'd get buirried by the wind-borne sand.

Meryl reluctantly reported to Remembrance these details in her usual straightforward manner and then added on that she thought there was a good chance that a storm might be on its way.

"Oh... that's just great," Remembrance said, looking a little faint again. "Is there any other good news you want to share with me, or is that about all of it?"

"There is good news in that we aren't undergoing this in the middle of the desert," Meryl added quickly to forestall her panicking. "In the desert there's nothing you can do in a sandstorm but hunker down, cover your mouth and pray. Here in the basalt flats at least we have shelter from the worst of the winds. If we can find a cave or even a good sized hollow to hole up in and use our cloaks to shed the sand off us, we'll be able to get by just fine."

"I'll keep an eye out," Remembrance promised, obviously trying to put the best face on things.

"Good," meryl said, nodding in approval.

A long period of silence stretched on as the three of them helped each other navigate the treacherous terrain together. Meryl fell into the old habit she'd developed to help her cross the hot, expansive wastes of the desert, pick a feature some distance ahead of her in the direction she was going whether it be a certain sand dune or a rock feature and focus her gaze on it, inwardly promising herself a sip of water once she reached it. It wasn't much, but it psychologically helped her get through the suffocating heat, the maddening wind and the ever-present hammer of the suns, and on this journey, helped her to ignore the myriad of other things that seemed to be wrong with her. Her left hand was throbbing painfully, even though she had her thumb looped through the shoulder strap of her backpack to elevate her hand over her heart, the place where her left pinky finger used to be (before she'd gotten kidnapped by Knives' henchmen) hurt abominably. It pulsed and throbbed painfully in time to her heartbeat and Meryl was, truthfully, afraid to unwrap it because she didn't want to see the sight of a bloody stump where her finger used to be. As amputations went, it was a mild one, hardly even worth mentioning, but it didn't _feel _at all mild. And she still had a lingering headache from whatever it was she had done to use that new ability of hers earlier that day. All in all, she was less than happy, and there was one more difficulty... Meryl looked over to where the angel traveled in thier group and tried hard not to glare at her.

Angelina, as usual said nothing, simply moving silently and with a preternatural grace that made it clear to any observer that there was something special about her. Meryl was happier the further away from the angel she was, she had nothing against her personally, it was just that the woman gave off a subtle humming vibration that was nearly maddening. It was like... like the feeling one gets from pressing ones tongue on the dual heads of a battery, feeling the mild currant pass through flesh, only instead of being confined to one area it was all over her body in whatever direction Angelina was nearest to her.

It was more than distracting, it was nearly maddening. The oppressive heat of the suns was bad enough to make her irritable but that strange tingle-burn that buzzed just under her skin was driving her slowly crazy! She'd tried putting as much distance between them as she could and that helped but only a little. She'd tried putting her mind on other things but it was always there in the background and irksome little itch that she couldn't alleviate.

:_That's odd,_: Meryl thought coming across a discrepency she hadn't thought of before. :_I never had this same problem with Vash_.:

Certainly she'd been annoyed and frustrated by him, and at times puzzled by his actions and the reasons for them, but despite every hint that she'd had (that Milly had seemed able to pick up on, but Meryl just seemed to overlook) she'd never detected anything truly out of the ordinary from him. If, like he'd said, he was in fact a plant angel like Angelina definitely was (because how many people had wings sprouting from out of their backs?) why had she never sensed any of the odd sorts of sensations she was constantly, and annoyingly, subjected to when in the presence of Angelina? Was it because Vash was independent? Was it because Angelina was a female? Was it because of some other factor? Meryl had no way of knowing, and that ignorance bothered her. She knew where she might find some answers though.

Meryl looked over at Doctor Remembrance and sighed internally with resignation. The only stupid question was the one she didn't ask, she supposed.

"Miss Remembrance," Meryl said, breaking into her thoughts.

"Yes?" she asked pleasantly.

"Supposing, hypothetically that is, that I would have run across another plant outside of a bulb..."

"Another plant?" Remembrance said, gaze looking at her sharply with interest.

Meryl got the odd feeling that the interest on her part wasn't entirly scientific. Meryl reacted automatically to protect her friend, she had no right to betray his secrets just because she was a little curious.

"Hypothetically," she hastened to reiterate. "Just supposing."

"Ah," Remembrance said, sounding disappointed. "Okay, hypothetically then.

"Yes, hypothetically would this plant give off the same kind of vibe I'm getting from Angelina here?"

"No, it would be much, much, worse," Remembrance replied immediately. "Angelina is bonded, no matter how much _you _dislike the fact. That Bonding stabilizes her Psi-wave and gives her an innate ammount of sheilding no matter how far away from her bondmate she is. An ordinary unbonded plant, pulled from out of the bulb without a potential bondmate nearby to stabilize the wave-output would probably incinerate everything within a mile radius once taken out of the containment sphere."

"Really?" meryl said, trying not to sound skeptical. Aside of the instance at Augusta, Vash had never demonstrated any of the characteristic for which plants were noted, in specific their ability to output energy greater than the sum of the energy they consumed to create it.

"In most cases," Remebrance said.

"Most," Meryl pounced on it. "But not all?"

Remembrance momentarily had a look on her face that said she'd gotten caught out at something she'd had no intention of admitting to.

"Er..." Remembrance temporized, obviously trying to think of a good excuse.

Meryl was treated to another realization. This woman _Knew_! Remembrance knew about the other plants, maybe not Vash _in particular_ but she certainly seemed to be aware of the fact that there were other independant Plants out there. Or maybe Meryl was just reading what she wanted to read into it. The burden of a secret could be a heavy thing she was coming to discover, and when Meryl was already feeling so very lost with everything else that was happening to and around her, she might just be wishing for someone she could talk with about it all. Milly wasn't there, and Meryl was coming to discover how very much she had come to rely on her friend and partner's good sense, advice, upbeat manner and unflappability.

:_I'm probably just imagining things_,: Meryl thought to herself, deciding against saying anything further.

The conversation lagged into silence, each woman keeping to her own counsel as they threaded their way through the rough, labyrinthine folds of the basalt valley with agonizing slowness.

Meryl had thought fist off, of using that mysterious new grid ability to try and just make more water when they needed it. After all, water was simple stuff, two hydrogens and an oxygen. She knew innately however that recombining enough of the molecules (probably literally out of thin air) in the kind of mass needed to supply water for them to drink would require too much energy for her to supply it innately.

"Hey," Meryl asked next, coming across an idea. "If Angelina is a plant, cant she just make water like a normal Plant can?"

"Angelina is Bonded," Remebrance replied. "Even ordinary Plants require machinery to channel the energy they supply into usable functions. If Angelina's Bondmate were here he'd easily be able to use his channels to make up as much water as he pleased but Angelina can't do it on her own."

Well that made sense, she'd never seen Vash able to anything with his plant abilities other than supposedly speak mind to mind with his brother (and she'd never actually seen that herself) and blow up a city. She imagined that if he'd been able to "magic things up from nothing" effectively, he'd have probably used that ability to give himself a lifetime supply of donuts. And booze. And possibly women.

Then another thought occurred to her. However clumsily, Meryl could use her Channels. She'd already done it twice, four times if you counted using them to knock out the bad guys. She could just use it to _make _the water they needed! It couldn't be that hard.

:_And it'll hopefully distract me from that damned vibe Angelina gives off_,: she grumbled to herself.

Absently guiding herself over the crags and rocks of the basalt valley Meryl turned her focus inward, mapping out the function nodes in her mind and spinning a grid. It appeared in the formless air in front of her, a grey spiral of nothingness that reminded Meryl of the spidery writings of the smoke from a single stick of incense, making little dragons in the air before it dissipated. A smokey-grey, flat spiral spread out before her little circles weaving themselves at regular intervals like planets in orbit around a sun. She mentally tallied the different kinds of function nodes she was going to need, one to isolate out the hydrogen molecules, one to isolate the oxygen molecules (since it would probably be easier to work with what was already in the air) another to resonate and electron bond, another for temperature and time and space. She added a Gate node into the center of the grid once she had all of the function nodes worked out and tapped that node into her own Source.

Bam!

A flash of bright light was all she saw.

The next thing Meryl knew was blue. All she could see was blue. A shadow fell over her and she vaguely came to realize that she was looking up at the sky... from her back. How had she wound up on the ground? She didn't remember laying down for a nap. her throat was dry and scratchy and suddenly as if triggered by one sensation of discomfort, the headache waiting off in the wings descended upon her with all the shrieking fury of a Midnight Kamiseen. Her head did more than merely throb, it felt like it was trying to come apart at the seams. Her eyeballs pulsed and her temples seemed to explode outward with every beat of her heart.

:_Oh, God, just let me die_: she thought.

She couldn't even contemplate doing anything about it. Right then the idea of moving even her littlest pinky finger was simply incomprehensible to her. She whimpered in pain.

"Thank-god you're awake!" Remembrance exclaimed.

Meryl gave a strangled noise of agony at the sound as her headache, impossibly, increased. Was the woman a sadist? Meryl took back everything nice she'd ever thought about her.

"How many fingers am I holding up?" she asked.

"Tell your identical twin to get out of the way so I can count them," Meryl whispered in agony, her vision seeming to blur and grey out at unpredictable interludes.

"This is bad," Remebrance muttered. "You have heatstroke. I'm sure of it."

"I do not, this is just stupidity and overconfidence," she grumbled trying to think of how she was supposed to be able to pick herself up and keep moving when she couldn't stand the idea of budging and inch. Just the thought of trying to stand up sent a new wave of agony slamming through her head, and she only had herself to blame.

:_See Meryl_?: she told herself. :_This is what happens when you mess around with things you don't really understand_.:

"What happened?" Remembrance asked next.

"I got the brilliant idea of just trying to use this weird new thing I can do to just make up more water," Meryl said.

Miraculously enough, her headache seemed to actually be fading steadily. Apparently once the lesson was learned the effects didn't linger for very long.

"After all," she continued an a slightly more steady tone of voice as she contemplated actually sitting up. "I reasoned that if I could use it to freeze metal and knock people unconscious, it had to be good for something useful. I figured I'd just use it to make the water we need."

Remembrance looked at her for a long quiet moment and Meryl, holding her head, tried to lever herself up to a sitting position. At last, Remembrance said quietly

"I can't fault your logic, but there's two things you didn't take into account. One, you're not Bonded so accessing your Source will drain your own _personal _supply of energy. And two, you're not Transitioned over. Your body as it exists now is incapable of Channeling a lot of energy all at once."

Meryl felt chagrined at her ignorance and annoyed at the same time. How the hell was she supposed to have known that? A week or two ago she'd just been a regular insurance worker, working part time at a diner to help pay the rent. Now all of these weird things were happening not only around her, but _to_ her. The things happening around her were fine by her lights, but the things happening _to _her were not acceptable. She was _normal _dammit! Normal! Or at least she'd thought she was. She'd been so much happier in that state of blissful ignorance that came with not knowing there was something unusual about her. Now she had strange things she had to worry about, like being Bonded and having a Source and just exactly how much energy she could Channel when she wasn't Transitioned over.

Deciding that she was going to ignore how very strange her priorities had gotten all of a sudden, Meryl gingerly raised herself to a sitting position and discovered that it brought only a slight throb to the dull ache hanging round her temples. Carefully she raised herself all the way to her feet and tested her balance and coordination. Her knees felt kinda weak and her body felt like it did when she'd gone too long without eating, but other than that... and the slight empty-pit feeling in her belly that was telling her that she was more than starting to get hungry. The effects of her combination of ignorance and overzealous experimentation seemed to be fading quickly with few lingering effects. Except the hunger and exhaustion. She'd have liked to have curled up for a nap, but there was so much more she needed to do yet.

She signaled to her companions that she was well enough and that they should get moving. To be perfectly honest, she didn't feel well; she felt tired and hungry, but none of those were debilitating and they could stop for a rest after they'd found a safe place to hole up for a little while. It worried her a little, more than a little, that they hadn't found any signs of someone pursuing them. Perhaps the captives were nothing more than a convenience of Knives' part and not truly important, and so therefore not worth pursuing. Maybe he was content to "let them die out in he desert" and wash his hands of them.

:_And what are we going to do about water_?: she wondered to herself.

She'd already found that trying to use her own Source to create it from out of thin air exceeded her threshold, so that left finding another Source to use. Her eye fell on Angelina and she got a notion.

If she could get Angelina to give her some of her plant energy, Meryl could use it in place of using her own Source (as she'd been momentarily tempted to with those four unconscious enemies back on the steamer) and make water with it. Having learned from her previous mistake, Meryl thought she'd gather a little information before she tried anything else with her new abilities.

"Miss Remembrance," Meryl began, breaking the silence of their sslow steady travails over the rough terrain of the basalt crags. "Since my own Source isn't strong enough, and Angelina can't use her powers without a channel, is there any way she can just give me a little of her own power to use?"

"If she were a normal plant, yeah, probably," Remembrance said, warming to her subject. "But Angelina is Bonded. The very Bonding that stabilizes her Psi-wave and shields her, enabling her to live in the outside world, also protects her from outside telepathic or other kinds of interference. Not even another Plant could resonate with her because the bonding with Marcus would prevent any outside resonance. Only her Bondmate can access her Psi-wave."

"So, then... no," Meryl thought in disappointment. Dammit.

She also felt a little relieved at being prevented by necessity from using her new abilities. For one thing, being out of the ordinary, now that she was consciously aware that there was something unusual about herself, made Meryl extremely uncomfortable and in truth, just a little unhappy. Strange occurrences were fine as long as they happened to _other _people. Men like Vash were used to having weirdness in their lives and knowing that things weren't always exactly what they seemed. the very real notion that not only was the unknown in her life in the form of a very close frined but now it was infecting her as well... Meryl was very much less than happy about it.

:_It may well be useful, but I'm not sure what the risks are that are involved, other than the fact that if I Bond off, I'll end up like **him**_.:

A momentary flashback to a time when she'd sat by her fathers bed holding his hand and trying to reassure him that everything was going to be okay, while she had resonated helplessly with that deep, dark, soul-sucking chasm of emptiness and despair that was the wreck he'd become after the death of his Bondmate. Meryl shuddered, goosebumps raising on her arms and up her back at the merest thought of it. No, she was much happier the way she was accustomed to being. Her uncle was right to warn her off from it. These powers might seem like something really wonderful, but in the end the cost for them might just be more than anyone had bargained for.

Still, right now she had to concern herself with survival. Remembrance was right when she said that their chances of not making it through this insane escape plan (the words "out of the frying pan and into the fire" never rang more true) were not exactly good. Having access to a supply of water would be more than good.

"Is there any other kind of Source I can use, like could I access regular energy and use it that way?" Meryl wondered aloud.

Remberance stopped and looked over at her, the expression on her face both surprised and intrigued at the same time.

"I... I honestly don't know," she said after a short pause.

"My father used to do it that way," meryl continued, slowly trying to accept the idea into the fabric of her reality.

These powers were hers and always had been whether she'd remembered them or not. it was her responsibility now to use them or not use them for good or ill. Right at this moment there were three of them in the desert alone, running out of water and if she could use the grid to make more water then she would do so in order to survive.

"Of course," she added a moment later as her mind fed her the rest of the memory. "Drawing off from an inorganic Source is less than comfortable. The more you take in, the more painful it gets."

She shrugged her shoulders.

"But what about your threshold?" Remembrance pointed out. "You just tried to take in enough energy to make a drinkable amount of water and it laid you out flat."

Meryl was brought up short by this and paused for a moment, considering.

"Good point," she conceded. "I don't think it'll be a problem however if I just do it in little bits. IfIi can make it work at all that is..."

Angelina, who up until that point had followed along pretty much dociley, content to follow wherever the two of them led her, abruptly stopped and veered off to the left, scrambling quickly over the various crags and boulders of the black wasteland they found themselves in. Exchanging a look of bewilderment the two women scrambled after her calling out entreaties for her to wait up for them. A mad dash and a few minutes later and they caught up to Angelina hovering over a strange sort of rock formation, a crag in a cliff- face that led to a crevice. The crag and crevice glittered in the light of the suns. The crag was lined with a fine moss of glittering tiny crystal formations about the size of a cold 45 bullet and the crevice held larger spars of crystal, some of them as large as a handspan in width and with a diameter approaching four inches. The deeper part of the crevice marbled into a vein of some shiny black glassy substance that resembled obsidian to Meryl eyes.

Angelina pulled off her pack and cloak and stood before the cliff-face, her gaze direct and attentive for the first time that Meryl had ever seen her. There came a soft trilling noise from her throat as she spread her wings wide and gave off a soft humming noise and it seemed to Meryl that she blurred around the edges. The crystal inside the crags and crivices gave off a high-pitched, tinkling, resonating hum and started to glow! Angelina's own skin started to light up softly a pale white, like moonlight shining from out of her skin and the hummin became even more intense. The crystals in front of her glowed even more intensely, slowly pulsing with light and begining to change colors as Angelina moved up the scale of that strange humming trilling noise she made. The stones first glowed a dusky red and then pink then orange traveling up the scale right into brilliant yellow, green, blue-white then at last a violet-white with every change of note. meryl wasn't sure how she could tell, but she just knew that Angelina was somehow imparting some of her own power and energy into them. Apparently done charging them, Angelina moved into another high trilling note and the crystals started to shivver and then to snap off one by one, but the ends were sheer and perfectly cut. The solid mass of black crystal deep in the crag looked like it moved. It seemd to flow a little like black ink, take a shape as Angelina's trilling intensified (and it seemed to Meryl almost as if there was more than one singer coming from her throat) and then the strange rock solidified into the shape of a large oblong of crystal.

Angelina stepped away from the cliff-face and motioned Meryl forward. Puzzled, Meryl did as she was bid and bent to pick up some of the fallen crystal spars and bead-sized heads of crystal. They glowed softly in her hands and Meryl could feel the power radiating off from them as others might sense heat or cold, though the stones themselves remained cool to the touch.

"And I can use these?" Meryl asked, looking over at Angelina, who had already seemingly lost interest in the concern she had stirred up and was busy preening her feathers. Meryl was inundated with a feeling of assent as well as a little impatience... Angelina had drank the last of her water and she was thirsty!

"Your wish is my command," Meryl grumbled.

In reply Meryl got the image of her snot-nosed little brother making a face at her. Sh smiled a little at that, yes, if he were here that's exactly what he would have to say about it.

Meryl sighed, took out her canteen to try the experiment, and held it before her. She carefully mentally mapped out the same grid she had tried to use earlier, the one to recombine the molecules of Oxygen and Hyrogen into water in large quantities, and wove it out in front of her in that ephemeral dragon-smoke curling spiral with intricate spiral-patterns nodes woven into its pattern at regular intervals. The Source node this time was a little different, she wrote it to take in power at only a specific rate, one that wouldn't harm her though it would be slow going.

:_Here goes_: she thought a little nervously as she cleared her mind and reached out with her channels to tap into the enrgy source inside the stone.

It felt nothing like when she had accessed the Source energy of her own Source, or even when she had tapped into the Source of another. With them there had been a sort of warmth to it, a feeling of power that was mild and tamed down for a purpose, it had felt a little like dipping her hand in a pool of warm water and drawing some out for her to use. Tapping into the raw power inside the stone was nothing like that; it stung and it was _colder _somehow. It was more like dipping her hand into the path of a pressure hose set just above freezing and it felt to her inner senses like she'd scraped sandpaper across them just hard enough to draw blood and then poured saltwater on it. Her channels tingled and stung from the contact.

Determined to master it, Meryl resolutely got a better grip on herself and narrowed her focus, condensing down the "gate" that the energy would have to travel through and with the motion of Reeling Silk, Meryl pulled the energy from the stone into her channels, and centered it. Keeping it isolated from her own Source, she fed it directly through her channels, bypassing her meridians, and channeled it directly to the Grid she had created. The Source Node of the grid, to her relief, accepted it as easily as it had accepted the power from her own Source that she fed into it. The grid lit up in a steady spiral, the grid nodes blinking into full wakefulness. Meryl could almost feel it begin working.

"Ummm..." Rememrance said a little hesitantly, pointing downward. "It worked, but I don't think that's what you had in mind."

Meryl looked down to where Remembrance was pointing and to her annoyance there was a small cloud of mist gathering about her feet.

"I guess I have to give a specific location," Meryl muttered. She un-Junctioned her Grid from the Source and sealed off the Source while she went back and adjusted the grid, giving three locations for the water to collect, specifically inside their canteens over a perdiod of time until the canteens were full. She then tapped again into the Source-crystal, hissin gin a breath in pain and annoyance at the stinging sensation traveling within her and she drew off and centered the new source power. After a little time though, she found that the shocking sting settled into a mild, if annoying, current-feeling; certainly it was no worse that what she was having to put up with in the presence of Angelina, so Meryl decided that she could bear it.

"I don't see any difference," Remembrance said, looking at her canteen and trying not to sound disappointed.

"It takes a while," Meryl said a little shortly. "I have to work within my own limitations."

"You wouldn't have to if you'd get a bondmate," Remembrance said.

"Yeah, _that's_ not going to happen," Meryl replied trying not to sound as hostile as she felt towards the idea. "I'd sooner slit open my own stomach and stake myself out into the sand dunes for the scavengers to eat out my innards... alive."

"You certainly seem to feel strongly about it," Remembrance remarked.

"You would too if you'd seen what I've seen," Meryl replied.

Even intense love could be twisted over time, no way was she going to risk bonding off and having her bondmate go crazy. After all, look at what had happened with Knives and Vash. And then there was what had happened to her father... Meryl shuddered, no way. It was far too dangerous for anyone with any sense to contemplate.

"So, now we have water. That's one worry down, only half a million more to go," Meryl said cheerfully as she gathered up the rest of the stones.

The crystal she was using as a Source was one of the smaller bullet-sized ones and having it power her grid wasn't hardly making a noticeable dent in its reserves of energy. It hadn't even changed colors.

"Let's get moving," she said. And resumed in the direction they'd been traveling.

Sheesh," Meryl heard Remembrance mutter to Angelina. "What's this woman made out of?"

* * *

**ooops, sorry about the mix up. Thanks okami for pointing it out. Here's the chapter I meant to post.**


	29. Stowaway

The golden rolling dunes of the open desert had given way to flat scrubby pebbled gravel and jutting rock features of a terrain commonly called "scrag". It was a term used to describe a transition area that wasn't quite mountain, and wasn't quite desert. Vash tested the fragment of the keystone with Meryl's necklace again and found that the beam of light had steadily grown stronger over time, presumably because they were drawing closer to their destination. They had left all signs of even remote civilization behind. According to the globe-map taken from satellite photos they were well out of range of even the most determined caravan. They were in unknown frontier.

Due to the circumstances of their arrival on the planets surface, humanity had not spread out across it as the original colonist had probably intended. One, they lacked the resources to travel great distances away from the life-sustaining geo-plants and other facilities provided by his kin, namely, water for the most part. Secondly, there were a number of indigenous dangers in the wilder parts of the planet; herds of sandworms, poisonous indigenous plants (such as the thorns of the Barevi plant) insects and there were even reports of a large avion predator that could swoop down and carry off whole people but Vash had never seen one for himself and had never actually talked to anyone who had so he thought ti might all be just a tale told to scare people.

Their precipitous arrival on the planet had resulted in human settlement making a sort of pattern. The original SEEDs ships had orbited the planet in a series of clusters, grouped around the equator and prime meridians with one or two of the explorer and military class vessels clustered up near the poles to take readings and beam the reports back to the flagship for analysis. When the altered orders that Knives had made had gone out, it had hit the nearest ships first and so those were the first to tumble out of their orbits and disintegrate in the atmosphere. The ships that had gotten Knive's orders late had been saved by Rem's intercession and those were the ones that had made it to the surface of the planet and they'd landed pretty much in a straight line across the surface. While the ships had been falling from their places in orbit, the planet had still been moving in its daily revolution below them, resulting in the clusters of ships falling in a more or less straight line across the surface of the world, clustered together looking rather like beads on a string. So there was a generally straight line of human habitation in a ring at or near the equator (of ALL places, it had to be there!) and the northern and southern parts of the planet were for a large part unexplored. Granted, not all areas that the ships had landed had been settled equally, some of the smaller colonies had died out, others had grown to be the size of large cities still other areas had had several independent sites branch out like spokes on a wheel and spawn more independent sites. But even Vash, for all of his many years of travel had only ever been so far from the "main strip.' There was simply a whole lot of nothing beyond a certain point where habitation could be reliably sustained. He was now well past that point.

He'd spent the last half an hour toying with the piece of the Keystone and Meryl's necklace and wishing that there were a way to get to where he was going instantly. He just wanted to be where-ever in the hell it was that he was supposed to be going already! The ship was by far the fastest means to get anywhere on the planet but they'd been traveling for most of the day, the fact that they were already well into the area left unexplored because there was no way to extend enough supplies to travel out to it was irrelevant to the nagging sense of urgency in him that told him to hurry, hurry, hurry because he wasn't sure what amusements Knives would find to have with his Short Girl to keep him occupied while he waited. She was already missing a finger because of him, Vash was most anxious that she not be missing any _other _body parts.

:_She probably hates me_,: he thought glumly to himself.

He'd be lucky if she ever wanted to talk to him again. What had he been thinking? Saving Knives... feh. He should have known better, he should have known that this was how it would turn out to be. And now she was paying the price for his mistake. It wasn't right. He had to get her back and safe before anything else bad could happen to her. He only prayed that Knives would stick to his promise to do her no more harm until Vash could get him his stupid trinket.

:_I'd fully understand if she just wanted to pack up and go home and never speak to me or see me ever again_: he thought, trying to ignore the sharp little pain that jabbed at his chest with even just the thought of her leaving.

It would be best for her after all, everything around him got destroyed. He was the Humanoid Typhoon after all. It would be better for Meryl if she never even saw him again, that way she couldn't get wrapped up in his messes. He should never have come back. It was selfish of him and wrong. He'd thought that he could bring his brother back and he'd see how great the girls were and then everything would be fine, he'd never really thought about what would happen to the girls if everything wasn't fine, he'd never thought about the plague he'd be bringing on thier houses. And now look... Meryl kidnapped and missing a finger, held in durance vile by his evil twin brother who might or might not be contemplating doing bodily harm unto her.

:_Yeah, she'll definitely never want to see me again_,: Vash thought glumly.

Over the long course of years he'd gotten used to being lonely. He'd grown accustomed to solitude and to the sound of only his own footsteps crunching through the sand. And then along had come those two insurance girls. When he'd first heard the words "twenty-four hour surveillance" attached to his name he'd been brought up short. Who in their right mind would attach two women to babysit him at all hours of the day and night? But they'd stuck to him like a burr to a saddle-blanket, joined later by a "priest" who very obviously wasn't what he seemed to be. Some man of the cloth _he _was, Mister Nicholas D. Wolfwood. And Vash hadn't been lonely anymore. He'd no longer went out and got drunk with perfect strangers, sometimes he went out and got drunk with friends now, a novel experience for him. Except for the Short Girl, who would never be convinced to touch a drop of alcohol, Vahs suspected that someone in her family had been an alcoholic or she'd known someone who was... either that or she truly was a dyed in the wool control-freak. Either way he had people he'd grown attached to, a comrade in arms, a little sister and a...lady friend.

Sadly having close friends now meant that he really had something to loose, and Knives was always quick to exploit a weakness. Vash had been a fool to think that all it would take to change his brother's mind would be one fight and a little quality time together healing up. Leave it to Knives to have a back-up plan.

_So now what_?

What he wanted to do was to turn the ship right around and go charging after her like some knight in shining armor. So that was exactly what he _wasn't_ going to do. Knives would be counting on his brother's usually impulsive nature, and he'd be sure to have something messy and unpleasant waiting for him, not to mention that Meryl was still a hostage. If Vash was ever really going to win this fight for good he was going to have to do better than out-fight Knives... he was going to have to out-think him. Knives had always been the planner, the strategist of the two, but Vash was sure he could think of something if he put his mind to it.

:_It looks like for once I have more information than my brother does_: Vash thought, perking up a little.

He knew what the keystone was, and what it was for. He knew about the Gaea Device, he even knew a little bit about the man who had made it and what his mission had been. He was slowly coming to understand a little bit how it opperated. There were still a lot of holes that needed filling in first though. First of all, the hologram of the good doctor had said that there were eight peices of the keystone and nine "great nodes," or places where the keystone fragments were sealed away and hidden. He'd said something about there being a sort of safeguard on the Gaea Device to keep it from falling into the wrong hands (like Knives' hands for example) some kind of organic component. What was that all about? Vash got the sinking feeling that he had a good idea of what the doctor might be alluding to.

Meryl had been given safeguard of the necklace (for whatever reason she didn't seem to know what she'd been given) that would lead the way to the eight pieces of the keystone. Vash was betting that her father wouldn't have given her the necklace if he had intended her to do nothing with the keystone once she had it assembled. Maybe the seal on the ninth node was something only she could access or something. Unfortunately for him and Meryl both, Knives had unknowingly secured a crucial piece of the puzzle, Meryl herself. If his brother discovered what he'd unknowingly acquired, her fate didn't bear thinking about.

That sinister, dark, almost seductive part of him that had seemed to be manifesting itself ever since the incident with Legato suddenly whispered darkly into his mind. He shouldn't _have _to wait around, gatheirng the pieces of the keystone for his brother like he was one of his lackeys, not when it would be much _easier _for him to hunt down the transport that Knives had arranged for her and intercept it himself.

:_No_,: he told himself, unwilling to risk even the slightest chance of Meryl falling into even more danger.

If he intercepted the transport and they killed Meryl just to keep him from getting to her, Vash would never be able to live with himself. And Vash no longer thought so well of his brother that he didn't think that Knives hadn't left standing orders with his minions to kill her off if Vash so much as showed his face anywhere within a three mile radius of her. He didn't like it, but it looked like the only thing he could do for now was to gather up the keystone and hope that things turned out for the best.

And that was exactly the the laid-back half-assed kind of attitude that had allowed his brother to manipulate and take him by surprise so very often, the other part of him retorted. If he really loved Meryl he'd go after her and tell his brother where to stick it.

:_It's precisely be cause I lo- am concerned for her_: whoa, he'd better be more careful, he'd almost used the forbidden L-word there, even in his own thoughts, acknowledgeing it was dangerous, for the other party. :_...That I can't afford to go rushing after her. Knives won't hesitate to press an advantage_.:

The keystone piece, which up until this point had been lying there quietly on the table, suddenly gave a flash of light and started throbbing steadily like some great lit-up heartbeat.

Figuring that the behavior was significant Vash slowed the ship down to a crawl and hailed the doc in his lab via the ships com.

"Hey Doc," he said. "I think we're here!"

"On my way," the doc called back.

Momentarily the door to the cockpit slid open and the older man showed up. He was wearing one of the old ships jumpers, the ones that had been designed for heavy-duty exploration, with tough fabrics and a lot of pockets and a belt with pouches and tools attached to it. A pocketed flak-jacket that likely held the smaller portable analytical devices that were still working on the ship was on over the jumper, and the anticipatory look on the old mans face quieted Vash's comment on whether or not it might be wise for the older man to come with him. After all, Vash knew, one only lived once and the Doc clearly felt this was worth seeing so who was Vash to tell him no?

The throbbing pulsing beam of light was now shining quite clearly towards a nearby rock formation. There was a large formation solid rock jutting up from the sand and gravel of the surrounding terrain that looked a little bit too regular to be a strict coincidence. Three large standing stones were set on their ends in a triangle inside a regular ring of smaller up-jutting pieces of rock, but even the smaller ones were comparative; they were still a little over waist-high on Vash and the taller three in the middle were about the size of two and a half of him if he could stand on his own shoulders.

"Looks like the place," Milly remarked. "I'm going to get the tomases out of the cargo hold so the poor guys can stretch their legs."

Good idea," Vash said. "Doc and I will take a look around first and make sure there's nothing dangerous in the area."

Since Milly was going to be busy with the tomases by the main entrance in the front, he and Doc were just going to have to use the smaller, ladder-exit attached to the engine room towards the back of the ship.

"You certainly seem to be in a hurry to get this done with Vash," Doc remarked. "This lady friend of yours must be very important to you."

"She is," Vash replied absently, then caught himself just as he saw his friends sly, slightly knowing look. "What I mean is... she's in trouble because of me, of course I'm anxious about her and eager to get her back! Hehehe!"

He had the feeling that his disarming smile and head scratch were doing nothing to fool his friend.

"I see," was all the Doc said. "Well take the advice of an old man who'd lived his life with very few regrets."

Vash looked over at him, a little surprised at the serious tone from his normally light-hearted and easy-going old friend.

"Touch passion when it comes to you Vash. True devotion is rare enough in this world, you shouldn't walk away when it calls you by name and invites you in. My lovely Maria may have gone on ahead of me, but I don't regret a day that I got to spend with her now that I am without her."

Vash nodded solemnly. He definitely couldn't make any promises, but it was good advice.

He would have added onto that but he was stopped by the sound of a voice calling his name. It was clearly a woman, but it wasn't Milly's voice...

"Oh dear," the doc said dryly, recognizing it as quickly as Vash had. She'd always been unfortunately attached to him, but they hadn't really thought she'd go quite _this _far.

"It seems we have a stowaway on board," Vash remarked his voice filled with humorous resignation.

He suppressed a sigh. Of all the rotten times for her to show up, it _would _be right when he was about to dive into places unknown and lives were hanging in the balance. One life in particular.

"Vash? Vash!" a muffled voice called from within the (probably locked) precincts of the engine room. She'd probably snuck in there while the engine was being looked over, stowed away, and gotten locked in.

"Coming," he said, a little less than pleased to discover her unexpected presence there.

He didn't have the time to drop her off back at the ship either, he had places he needed to go yet.

Vash keyed in the the lock code to the the access panel to the engine room and the door slid open. Vash was attacked by a ball of energy flinging itself at him at top velocity. Arms were wrapped around his waist as an affectionate "Vaaaash!" was yelled at about the source of his chest.

"Vaaaash!" she cried, clinging tightly to him. "I missed you so much! I'm so glad I found you!"

Vash wondered whether he should start trying to detach her from him or if she'd do it on her own. Nah, leaving her there would probably only encourage her. Besides, he felt more like scolding her than hugging her right then.

"Jessica," he said seriously, pulling her arms gently but firmly from around his waist, and when she tried to resist a little he simply ignored her minor strength (as compared to his) instead of caving in like he normally would have. He took her gently by the shoulders and looked down seriously.

"I'm happy you wanted to see me, but you shouldn't have stowed away on board."

"But I just-" she said, her eyes beginning to fill with tears at his disapproving look and reprimand.

"The places I'm going and the things I'll be doing are going to be dangerous," he overrid her firmly.

"I can handle it," she insisted.

Vash was reminded of a small child trying to be allowed to do something even though they didn't really understand it. Jessica just didn't have the background at all to understand anything of what he was going through right then. She'd lived all of her life cloistered away on that ship, sheltered from the harsh realities of the world below them. The people of the ship lived thier lives in peace and safety, afraid of the world below as a child is afraid of monsters in the closet. The dangers on this world, of bandits and sandworms, and slavers and killers and rapists and theives were as little more than childrens stories to her, told to titillate, but not really _real _in her mind.

"I should turn this ship around and drop you off back home," he said with the feeling of an older sibling whose younger sister has followed him to places she'd be better off not seeing. "But I can't take the time out to go all the way back, so you're going to have to stay here."

As he had been talking he'd led her gently but firmly down the hall to one of the empty spare rooms and keyed open the lock.

"But I want to go with you!" she yelled even as he tried to get her to cross the threshold without pushing her or picking her up. She dug her heels in and wrapped her arms about his waist.

"I know you do," he said trying to work himself free without hurting her. "But you can't."

"Why not?" she demanded next. "I can work technology better than most people, and I'm a good cook too. I can be useful! I just want to stay with you."

"It's too dangerous. I've already got one lady in my life into trouble, I don't want anything to happen to you too."

With that Vash gave her a gentle shove and snapped the door shut and locked the panel from the outside. Vash heard thumping on the door and Jessica calling his name entreating him to let her out and that she wanted to come with him. the cries were piteous as a kitten asking to be picked up and fed, but Vash resolutely ignored them and turned to walk down the hall.

Down through the engine room, Vash gave a quick look around while the Doc tested the area with scanners. He didn't sense anything so he looked over at the doc.

"Anything?" Vash asked.

"I'm picking up unusual energy readings, they seem to be coming from underneath us, but other than that... no," the doc said. Ol' Bessy has been picking up those same readings for the last few hours or so, so I was pretty much expecting that. Let's get started shall we?"

Vash nodded a firm affirmative. Soonest started was soonest done after all and he had a Short Girl to rescue.

* * *

**I had a great time at the con. There was a new artist there who had Vash prints for sale so i scored two of them! Last Year when I went looking for anything Trigun related it was like the search for the freaking Holy Grail or something. I was so happy to have scored some awesome artwork by a talented artist (whose name i forget... eheh...). I hope you all enjoyed this chapter and reveiw fro me to let me know what you think. Hey look, Jessica showed up *flatly* yay...**


	30. Standing Stones

Vash nodded and walked up to the first circle of standing stones. He was a little bit uncomfortable when the Doc pulled out a hover-cam and apparently started recording it, first giving a recap of recent events and his discoveries about the stones and Vash's involvement with them. Always important to keep good records in the areas of scientific discovery, otherwise anyone who should follow behind you in case something were to happen to you wouldn't know what you'd been and what you'd done.

The keystone fragment pointed to one stone in particular so Vash went to that one. He stood in front of it for a moment and the necklace that Meryl had given him for safekeeping started to glow with a pulsing silvery-white light. The smooth flat surface of the standing stone shimmered then silvered over, turning glassy smooth. For a moment, vash's reflection stared back at him and then was replaced by an image of a cup of water with a number beside it indicating mass. A panel with the symbols for different elements and molecular bonds, plus a spiraling grid with "empty" nodes in it appeared to the right of the image. A quick light-up walkthrough of how to use the panel and create the nodes flashed over the screen.

:_Ah, I see,_: Vash thought watching it work.

Instead of familiarizing him with the different chemical combinations that made up certain substances like the last game had done, this game seemed to be focused on Vash learning to break down the component parts in a substance and learn to recreate it from the molecules out. And to do so using some kind of grid to do it.

Vash learned the terms and parts of the Grid. The silvery moon-mist "cord" that formed the backbone of the grid was called a channel, the round circles on it lined up like beads on a string at even intervals of the grid were called nodes. There were different kinds of nodes like function nodes and source nodes. Source nodes were always in the center of the grid but the program didn't explain what they were or what they did. Vash was shown mainly the use of the function nodes. Function nodes were woven of an equation-like programing language of symbols representing measurements of energy, time, and more importantly a symbolic language of atoms and thier molecular bonds. A Grid it seemed, was created for the purpose of taking one substance and turning it into another or creating one substance out of molecular recombination.

His siblings, the plant angels in the bulbs, could do the same thing, creating water and food out of pure energy... but vash, unfortunately, had never managed to figure out the trick of it.

Vash, with the camera hovering just over his shoulder, got to work. The first grid was, predictably, easy, the second grid it wanted him to build was a little harder, with more elements in the compound and a greater complexity in the shape of the bonds. The first stone had him work through ten such smaller grids before indicating with a bright flashing arrow that he was to proceed to the next stone in the circle.

The game on the second stone was much like the first, only _more _so. This game wanted him to simultaneously create two grids with two separate compounds that were to work right alongside each other and junction them to each other from the same source node. The two compounds were to be created separately by most of the grid but the ending node would bring them together in a particular order. Generally the compounds created separately but out of a single source node were symbiotic in nature, the excess molecules from the one recombining into the compound on the other end of the grid in much the same way that carbon-dioxide was chemically recombined inside of a plant to form oxygen. The two channels looked a bit like an axis coming out from the source node and spiraling around each other like a complex yin-yang made of spiraling string-bead nodes. It was a little more complex figuring out how to create a symbiosis of two different compounds, but certainly well within Vash's ability to handle. There was no pesky timer this time but Vash worked quickly anyway. Ten rounds of that, and Vash was allowed to move onto the next standing stone.

The third stone had him not only creating and combing two separately functioning grids with a single function node but also had him doing several of them all at once. He was shown how to tuck one grid inside of a node, creating a sub-grid. A sub-grid acted like a sub-routine in a computer program, it carried all the commands and functions to make a particular aspect of the main program run smoothly. So now he was not only working with nodes, but with now had gride within nodes on larger grids. He quickly learned that when creating a function grid, it was important to keep the parameters of the main grid in mind lest one should accidentally create a sub-grid with functions in it that conflicted with the functions of the main grid. Each grid he was asked to create only had one sub-grid node, thankfully. Ten rounds after his first successful sub-node grid and Vash was graduated to the next stone.

Predicatably the next stone had not only one sub-grid, but two of them. Vash managed that just fine, even when the later rounds of the game gave him a grid with two axes. The next stone gave him the addition of a third axis on the grid. So out of a single source node there were three different channels dividing a single grid into three sections that spiraled back in and coiled round itself. Each "axis" (as Vash privately termed the different sections made by the three different channels sprouting out and circling around one another from out of the same source node) contained at least one sub-grid which had to have a function node carefully constructed so that it would not only aid the grid in its own section that it was written for, but also be able to get along with the functions of the nodes in the other sections of the grid.

"And I'm only halfway there," he muttered to himself after he'd managed to thread his way through the convoluted functions asked of him for ten rounds on the fifth stone.

"It's fascinating!" the Doc enthused, having gotten every last second of Vash's game-stones on record with his hover cam looking over Vash's shoulder.

Well, at least one of them was happy about it. Vash took a deep breath and set to work again. The next stone had three axis channels out from the central source node, but had two sub-grids to each axis rather than only one. Ten rounds of that, Vash got the feeling of learning to juggle (which he could do), starting out with only one ball and adding a second and then a third and practicing with those and then slowly adding more and more balls until the day he could juggle ten or twenty different things without once dropping a ball.

"It feels less like a game than it does like some kind of lesson programing," vash remarked.

His mind wandered momentarily back to the times on the ship when he and Knives had been given lessons by the crew. Rem and the captain had both been fond of a more hands-on style of instruction. Rem had taken for long walks in the Rec-room, pointing out different kinds of plants and animals that appeared in the "natural" world and telling them some things about them but letting them learn other things by their own observations. The captain had been fond of creating computer programs, a lot like these games Vash was currently solving, that taught them about maths, and science and even how to map relatively on an interstellar model.

"Gee Mister vash," Milly said from where she'd wandered over from feeding the tomases. "Don't you think that those grid thingy-ummies you're building all seem to have something in common."

Taken aback, Vash paused and re-examined the grid he was building and then compared it to the ones he'd been working on for the last hour or two and was a little _un_surprised to note that, as usual, Milly had hit on something. The compounds he was working with were all made from many of the same basic elements, just different structures of the molecular compounds. They all appeared to be organic in some way, certainly they were carbon-based. By this point Vash was on the eighth stone with two more to go in the outer ring and he was working with a binary source node, that was, two source nodes that circled each other like the binary stars in their own solar system, each source node with its own little solar system of a three-axis-channel-grid spiraling out from it and around each other, each channel possesed of not only regular function nodes but multiple grid-nodes with their own little sub-grids and nodes tucked away inside.

"Yes Milly," Vash said finishing off the latest grid he had been asked to assemble. "It does look like they all have something in common."

Vash couldn't quite put his finger on it. It was like looking at one of those pictures that looked like nothing more than a collection of random images all thrown together but if you looked at it in a certain way it made a picture. Like seeing something from the corner of his eye and knowing that if he turned his head he'd recognize what it was but at the same time being certain that if he moved he'd loose the picture.

"It looks like it's having you build something from the molecules out," remarked the doc. "The very first of the sub-grids have you recombining the molecules into compounds and the function nodes thereafter steer those molecules into the compounds themselves. The next set of sub-grids recombine the compounds into chains and the function nodes after that set of sub-grids take the chains and assign them functions, just as in any regular organism. And the sub-grids after that take those functioning chains and make them into more complex objects such as cells, which have codes for protiens in them. and so on and so forth."

Well now that he'd had it pointed out to him...

Vash sighed a little. This was all very fascinating, but he'd be a lot happier with it if it would just let him get inside so he could get that stupid keystone piece and then get moving to gather the others so he could rescue Meryl.

"There!" Vash said in triumph what felt like _years _later after he'd finally finished the tenth grid on the last stone of the outside circle. The silver standing stones on the outside of the ring shimmered silver for a moment then slowly withdrew into the ground and disappeared as if they had never been. Only the three inner stones were left.

As he approached them they shimmered mirror-silver and presented him with an image. It was a single geranium seed with a semi-transparent screen with swiftly scrolling data beside it telling him all the particulars of the plant. The other two stones were filled with a vastly complex, but empty, grid. Vash got it, and sighed. He was to reconstruct the geranium plant from the molecules out, using the empty grid. To be accurate, he was to reconstruct all of the information that was found within a single seed of the plant.

To his relief it wasn't so monumental a task as it at first seemed. The first ten grids had familiarized him not only with how to operate the grid system, but somewhere in each of the rounds he'd played, there had been a point that it had actually given him one of the parts he would need for the grid he was currently being asked to fill up in the center three stones. So basically he had all of the answers, he was simply being asked to fill in the answers in the correct patterns.

It seemed to take forever. And by the time Vash was nearly finished daylight had long since faded into darkness, Milly and the doc had forced him to take a break at sunset so that he could eat and get his mind off it, but even when he hadn't been actually working on the grid his mind had been occupied with it, planning his next move, so that the chatter of his two friends had faded to a gentle yet comforting background hum. Jessica, the doc had informed him as he'd handed Vash his dinner of ships rations, was in a pout in her room and asking that he be the one to come and feed her. Vash had reluctantly shaken his head, he was too busy right then to hold her hand and let her pout, she'd come out when she was hungry or not, it would have to be her decision.

It was nearly midnight by the time Vash had finished with the grid. His head felt heavy and stuffed with wool by the time he was done, the Doc was still recording as enthusiastically as ever. Vash noted that he'd even dragged out some of the portable computation devices and was working on something on it. Possibly a copy of the program that Vash was working on.

When he at last filled in the functions for the final node and let it go, the source node lit up a brilliant white and the channels and nodes spiraling out from it lit up in quick succession in a wave from a central point, like a ripple from a pebble thrown into a still pond. The three stones surrounding vash began to vibrate slightly in a soft hum that thrummed into his bones a bit. vash got the momentary feeling of being outside of himself and elsewhere, he was enveloped in a soft light for a moment and feeling of peace and tranquility swept over him, it felt just like the feeling he got whenever he communicated with his sisters on his brief visits there. It was the comfort and tranquility of a child in the womb, a place of belonging and safety and Vash never stuck around but it was always nice to have a place he could got to where he felt accepted and like he belonged.

He blinked and found himself back inside his own skin, the feeling of comfort faded but did not disappear completely. He looked around him, the three standing stones were lit up with their silvery-white spiraling patterns around in them but the air in the space between them was no longer ordinary space. Instead it seemed to be filled with a shimmering translucent screen of white light. On every angle Vash looked there were images being played over the screens that the shimmering force-fields made. The screens flickered through images of different kinds of plants, flowers, trees, grasses, vines, each accompanied by an image of a different grid. As abruptly as the images had started, they stopped. The screens disappeared and the ground Vash had started on rippled outwards with a soft white light. He shielded his eyes for a moment as the white light that blanketed the ground like sand resolved itself into individual spiraling patterns rippling outwards and then faded.

As the light on the ground faded three beams of light from the tops of the pillars that Vash had created his last grid on met in the center. Down from that meeting place an object floated gently as a piece of feather-down on the wind. It was opaque and black and it glinted softly in the moonlight. About the size of his fist, it was an uneven tetra-hedron of black stone smoothed to a glassy finish. The second keystone fragment.

Vash reached out a hand and it landed gently on his palm. He felt that strange heartbeat-throb pulse through him for an instant as his hand touched the keystone for the first time before it subsided into quiescent silence.

:_So there it is_: Vash thought looking down numbly at the glassy perfection of the black peice of the keystone. He was nagged again, as he was every time he looked at it, by the sense that he'd seen something very like the substance that they keystone was made out of, but he simply could not seem to place it.

Vash pulled the other tetrahedron from out of his pocket and held it in his prosthetic hand beside the second peice. Like two magnets attracting to one aother, the two peices tried to pull together. At first Vash tried to keep them apart but the attraction grew stronger the longer he resisted. After a moment or two he gave up and simply let them go. They flew together like two magnets and clicked softly when they met. The two tetra-hedrons vibrated softly for a moment, then to his surprise, fused together on one side. Vash was left with a shape that looked like someone had taken a pyramid and cut it in half diagonally from the tip downward. There was not even the suggestion of a seam or a crack along the place where the two fragments had once been separate, it was as glassy-smooth as if it had always been carved from a single piece of stone.

Vash shrugged. Like so many mysterious things lately, he couldn't even begin to know where to start unraveling the mystery. He held the new keystone piece aloft in one hand in a gesture of triumph, like "I got it!" and Milly clapped her hands.

"Wheres our next heading?" she asked curiously.

She was as fascinated by the funny little rock they were all going to so much trouble to get as Vash and the Doc were it seemed.

Vash pulled Meryl's necklace out from under his shirt where he kept it for safekeeping, and dangled it pendant-like above the apex of the keystone. The surface of the stone seemed to ripple and shimmer, a skittering of grey-dark something seemed to dance over its surface for a moment and the stone hovered in the air before them orienting itself in one direction before lighting up and letting out a single strong beam of light like a lighthouse beaming into the fog.

"That way," Vash pointed unnecessarily.

They nodded once together and Milly helped the doc gather the materials and equipment that he'd unpacked in the course of the day and they loaded everything back into the little vessel. Vash yawned realizing that it was by that time well after three, almost four in the morning. He'd been going pretty well non-stop since noon.

"You should get some rest," Milly advised, obviously on the way to do the same.

Vash looked a little hesitant, staring over at the stone. What if they should reach thier destination while he was asleep and there was no-one to notify him and they overshot and had to backtrack?

As if she could read his mind, and at this point Vash wasn't entirely certain she couldn't do just that, Milly said

"I had a nice long nap this afternoon and after dinner. There was nothing else to do while you finished. I'll keep an eye on that rock and make sure we don't get lost. I'll call you if anything changes."

Vash acceded to the advice and said

"G'night," and headed to his quarters for some sleep. His head felt stuffed full to bursting.

Meryl gasped out in pain at a sudden strange burning sensation along her middriff, as if she'd suddenly been stung or burned by a spark from a fire, only it seemed to crawl outward from her navel like an ember would burn a hole in a peice of paper and spread outward from the central point. As abruptly as the sensation came, it disappeared in a throbbing beat like some great heartbeat thrumming through her whole being for an instant and then... nothing. She looked down, worried that she might have gotten burned or that something was stinging her. There was no evidence of anything on her clothing and she surreptitiously lifted the hem of her tank-top and looked at her stomach, there wasn't a burn there, but there was something else...

:_What the hell is **that**_?: she wondered, utterly mystified.

It appreadered to be some kind of marking on her skin. It looked a bit like a tattoo in intricate spiralling knotwork patterns that made absolutely no sense to her, but instead of being written in a regular black ink, the markings were of a pure silver, the kind that snone white in the sunlight. Meryl poked at it and was a little purprised to note that it didn't feel any different from her ordinary skin, it flexed and moved just the same, it didn't feel hard or lumpy, not even like scar tissue might feel. It wasn't cold or hot, for all she could tell it felt just like she'd gotten a tattoo. But Meryl Stryfe did not have any tattoos, especially not silver ones.

:_What the hell is happening to me_?: she wondered, panicking a little on the inside.

Was this a result of her experiments with teh water making? If so, perhaps she'd better stop it altogether. She didn't know what was going on, was this supposed to be normal?

:_What the hell am I thinking, none of this is normal_,: she thought to herself, her thoughts edged slightly with a real fear. She didn't know what was happening to her or why, she didn't know what was causing it or how to make it stop. And that frightened her too.

* * *

**Sorry for the late update, it's been hectic. I hope you liked reading this chapter as much as I liked writing it. I'm not sure why but the inticate and kinds dull stuff like describing in detail how the grid system works is like, my favorite thing to write. The devil is in the details I guess. ^_^**


	31. Crossing Paths

Knives looked over at his new captive, shaking his head a little. it was strage the sensort deprivation chamber had broken men that were made of sterner stuff than this one appeared to be. The creature wept like a woman and begged to be released, swore it didn't know what Knives was after and it just wanted to go home, and it was so scared and couldn't Knives please just let it go...? But still something within refused to break no matter what Knives did to it. and it wasn't even really like the creature was fighting back, there was no sense of Knives being fought off, the creature just hung there helplessly. Knives had tried combining the slow steady flaying of the flesh with a mental probe to no effect, Knives had splashed saltwater on the open wounds of the creature's flesh and combined that sensation with a forceful mental probe hoping to break the sheilds around the creatures thoughts and channels by method of sheer shock and that had not worked.

Elendira was dutifully hosing down the white room in the interior of the ship after the latest of Knives' unfruitful sessions. Knives frowned in irritation. He might possibly have to move on to breaking its bones as simply the methodical damage of its flesh seemed to be having no effect except to make teh creature beg for mercy from him. Still it managed to deny Knives access to those all-important channels, and knives, much as it infuriated him to have to admit it, needed those channels if his plan was to proceed.

This was why he had not wanted to rely on this particular strategy; it hinged annoyingly on the use of one small quasi-human creature. Knives knew better than to expect cooperation but he'd been reasonably confident until now that he could manage to break it into accepting the yolk Knives had planned for it. Sleep deprivation hadn't worked, the creature just went into some kind of trance that was not sleeping or waking. The sensory deprivation chamber had not seemed to work, from what the readings on its brainwaves had been, the thing spent much of its time mentally somewhere else. The thousand cuts all along its skin hadn't woked in part because it seemed to possess superior regenerative capabilities, much like he and his brother possessed.

:_But it is not like me and my brother_: he reminded himself looking down from the observation window and watching it beg the human that Knives had sent in to wash the floor of the blood from Knives' latest session to help it escape. No, it had once been human before it had been changed to something else, something that was still half human, but half some kind of lost technology that Knives had never run across before.

The nerve whip, a device that sent painful electro-chemical impulses along the creatures nervous system, had not worked on it and Knives had never met a human yet that had not given into the pain that that thing caused. it begged for mercy and for freedom but still it would not relinquish control of its channels to him. While it possessed a will of its own, Knives did not dare trust it with even the smallest level of access to his own gate, but without its channels Knives could not enact the rest of his plan.

He looked a little longingly over at the device that Knives had recreated from the shell of the first device, the one that had wiped out the town of Stryfe and collected the power of over a hundred human life-energies and stored them away. At last! he'd found a use for the pesky human vermin, and here he was being stymied by one intransigent little halfbreed. Without access to those channels that the creature had on it Knives could not make teh device work, but it was if the creature had some kind of magical, unbreakable protection around it. No matter how Knives hurt it and made it scream or weep or beg, its channels remained sealed away from him. he couldn't understand it, it's will should be broken by this point and yet... those channels remained sealed away from him. Knives gritted his teeth in annoyance. He hated having rely on another, especially one that had once been fully human, but Knives, for all of his power, lacked the means to channel and use that power.

If only he could get such a creature of his own, bent to his will alone. he discarded the idea as quickly as it had come up and not for the first time. it was simply too risky. Everything he had read on those blasted creatures said that, while they had been created to serve his kind (well actually the file had said "aid") it had also been very clear that they could only do so by "Bonding" with his kin. And the bonding was a mutual bond, whatever Knioves did to this proposed creature under his own power he would in turn feel himself. Besides, Knives already considered himself Bonded, he and his twin were bonded in ways that superceded anything a mere human could ever possibly hope to understand let alone take part in. he would certainly never relinquish his bond with his twin in foavor of some other bond no mater how more powerful in made him. Oh, but if he could find a way around it...

:_The device_,: he thought longingly.

Once he had the creature properly broken to Knives' will, he intended to hook him into the central part of the device, in much the same way that his own poor sisters were currently bonded into those glass prisons and the machines that they were attached to. He smiled to himself, his heart lifting a little with delight. It had a certain poetic justice to it.

Once the creature was installed, Knives would move the ark over to the Cairn, the wreck of an old seeds ship, left undiscovered within a few thousand miles of the place that the humans now called May City. There he had installed the other half of his device. The Cairn connected to the other half of the device he had built here on his ark (once he'd finished bringing the useless quasi-human under his sway and gaining control over the things channels) was supposed to create a sort of manual override when combined with the keystone that his brotehr was currently collecting for him. His device would give him not only access to, but control of, the Gaea Device.

He didn't know why his siblings had gone to such lengths to try and keep it a secret, especially from him, the brother who loved them best, but his servant had discovered it more or less by accident when looking into the events around the incident at Stryfe. That, incidentally, had given him the idea of emtying out the Southern Cornelia Region partly as a message to his brother, and partly as another step in his alternate plan to rid the world of humanity.

Knives smiled, instead of draining his poor sisters into uselessness to create the promised Eden, Knives planned on getting rid of every last disgusting human on the planet, of ridding the world of their infectious plague once and for all. He could drain them of thier life energies using the device he'd built based on the Energy drainer from the town of Stryfe, and use that to fuel to the transformation into Eden. Glee lit within his heart. There was nothing more fitting than this.

:_If this wretched creature would hurry up and break already_: Knives through with impatience and irritation. :_Then I could finally start to proceed with my own plans._:

The young man looked pleadingly over at where he knew Knives to be observing him and begged once again to be let free, but this time, delirious with pain he let something slip that all of the sessions before he had kept behind his teeth.

"Please sister... help me."

It had been a whisper, practically under his breath like a prayer, but Knives had picked up on it.

A sister? There was another of his kind? Knives had thought that Resonants only bred to the male, that was the only way their special abilities could be passed along. He frowned in thought. Perhaps a woman would be easier to persuade...

He shook his head. He didn't have the time to hunt her down and acquire the girl, and it would probably be a wasted effort anyway, he already had a Resonant in the hand and it was only a matter of time before he broke it to his purposes. There was no need to go and look for the other one, not while he still had this one in his power.

Knives smiled to himself again. Soon. Eden was at hand.

* * *

Legato looked at the readings on the minature ships consoles and gritted the teeth in his borrowed body. Still nothing. How difficult could it be to locate the presence of three little women?

he had to admit that with his recent death and leap to his new body and the epic struggle for control against a dying host that was unwilling to reliquish his cling to this life, his skills and strength weren't at their best, but he was certainly more than capable of telepathically tracking three normal humans out here in the howling wilderness where there was nothing and no-one around for iles and iles.

He'd located a few wild animals, a small four-beast herd of tomases, a two-beast pack of grendels hunting, and a few other biologicals, but the mental signature that should have been very clear was nowhere to be found.

Perhaps they had already been eaten. No, that simply couldn't be. Despite how naive and unprepared the other two might be, the smaller of the Master's Brother's little humans was certainly capable of surviving for a day and a night on her own out in the wastes, even with very little in the way of supplies, he'd examined his current hosts memories in search of information and had been well relieved to find that the traitor had felt that the woman was perfectly capable of taking care of herself. Legato himself had done an extensive dossier on the two creatures that Master's Brother had allowed to travel with him against the day when the Master might decide that they could be of use to him, the small girl would still be alive and she would not have left the other two behind. Therefore the three of them were still together and alive. For them to be anything else would mean failure, and the Master did not tolerate failure.

So now that thier lives for the time being were not in any more danger than usual, he felt it bet to concentrate his energies of actually trying to track them down and bring them back into the fold. The work would go much faster if he had servants of his own. Legato mentally toyed with the idea of taking over the mind of an animal and seeing through thier eyes, he had often done so with cats as part of his Master's instructions to keep an eye on the Master's Brother, but doing so required a sort of mental projection that both left Legato's physical body dangerously weak and made his mind very open to psychic attack. he had control of his new body for now, but he was pretty certain that his host was still hiding himself there somewhere in the labarythine twists and turns of his mind. If legato vacated his body, even only partially, the host's consciousness would be certain to seize the weakness as an opportunity and possibly somehow manage to take back his own body. Too risky. Something else then.

Legato cast about with only his telepathic abilities. It limited his range far more than mental projection, but it left him firmly in control of his body so in this case it was actually worth the trade-off. For a moment his spirits lifted as he caught the edge of human thoughts and mental signatures far distant, just at the edge of his range. Thinking he'd found them, Legato zeroed in on them for a closer look to get distance and direction, possibly even take control of thier minds and make them stay in one place until he'd reached them. His heart sank a moment later when he realized that the mental voices he'd picked up on were not what he was looking for. They were numerous and most definately male, while he was looking for three that were female. Still, he quickly sorted through them, no sense in not being thorough, it could be that they'd aqquired the women he was looking for and they were unconscious and thier fainter mental signatures were being covered up by the stronger mental signatures of what were probably either sand-bandits or slavers. A moment later legato shrugged in an 'it figures' manner; they did not have what he was looking for, he could tell by some of the mental complaints about the lack of women and the thoughts that they should find a small settlement and raid it for some. Animals.

:_This is why our miserable species will never achieve true greatness_: he thought to himself of humanity, completely agreeing with the master's opinions on the matter.

:_Human's, the men especially, are too caught up in satisfying their underlying needs at the cost of their own kind and with a careless disregard for others, that they have doomed themselves to the just punishments that Master will soon visit upon us all_.:

There was only one kind that could achieve Eden, only one kind that _deserved _to achieve Eden... the kin that had sacrificed themselves to preserve an undeserving and wretched race, their perfection, thier love, thier infinate patience. These were the traits that deserved to inherit a perfect world. This and none other.

Legato dutifully brought himself out of his woolgathering, and set his mind back o the task at hand. there would be time to turn his contemplations to the beauty and perfection that was the Master and his kin later, for now the Master had set him a task. It would go much more quickly if he had some assistance in finding his wayward charges. legato shrugged the broader shoulders of his borrowed shell with a small internal chuckle at the thought that if he cared to he could now take on any human guise he wanted. The only tell-tale that would give him away was his eyes, they would always remain the same golden color of his first life.

it wouldn't be so bad to have a little help with his task, it would make the work go more quickly. Legato oriented himself on the faint mental traces of the humans in the distance. he'd take them over first and use them to seach for and capture the women that the Master had sent him after. Who knew, perhaps the master might have a further use for them. If not, well they wouldn't go to waster either, they could always use more humans to feed the mater's device and haveing humans under Legato's sway would add more prison guards to oversee the rest in that prison camp near the Cairn. legato nodded to himself, gather slaves first then proceed.

* * *

The two tomases nestled in the cargo hold of the ship (the only place large enough to fit the both of them and Milly wouldn't hear of leaving them behind) looked over at him with wide liquid-dark eyes and made soft hooting noises. Milly's tomas, which she called Farinelli, phlegmatically chewed on a peice of cud while the one he'd ridden across the dunes, (which was nominatively Meryl's tomas named Tam) wriggled a little in search of a more comfortable position. it was no wonder that it couldn't get comfortable, it still had all of thier gear loaded onto it. vash had come out with the intention of unsaddling the beast now that thier course was decided upon and they were underway, leaving the ship on autopilot.

Tam hooted softly, Vash imagined that it was from relief, as vash reached for the buckle tying the breast and Belly band together and reached under the beast to undo the main belly-buckle. Moments later he lifted the heavy saddle and his and Meryl's gear off from Tam and stowed the saddle away. He picked up his duffel and slung it over his shoulder so he could stow away in his rack for the duration of the journey but paused. His eye fell upon the lurid pink monstrosity that was Meryls travel sack. It didn't actually belong to him so stowing it with his things might be misconstrued, on the other hand if he left her things here in the temporary tomas stable and something happened to them she'd probably get mad at him. Well, why not then? It wasn't like she was going to share a room with him, he was just watching after her stuff, that was all. He pulled out the collapsable handle and towed the bag along behind him towards his temporary quarters.

The quarters were a grey that was supposed to be soothing but just ended up kinda drab and bare of ornamentation. Vash deposited his duffel in the storage unit under his sleeping matress and just placed Meryls suitcase in a corner of the room. He plopped into bed, feeling his body go lax but his mind refused to let him drift off to sleep. The thought that they were on thier way was a relif to him, he'd rather be moving than standing still after all (moving targets, as he well knew, were harder to hit) but the thought of how much more he had left to go was a little disheartening. And he was still worried about how Meryl was being treated. For a brief moment vash wished that there was a way he could get in touch with Knives, assure him that Vash was being a good boy and doing exactly as his brother had demanded of him and to please not hurt Meryl, but the moment passed when he thought of all of the other things he'd like to say to his brother. This nonsense was way beyond getting old. It had passed the "getting old" phase around the incident at July.

Vash's mind wouldn't let him rest, there were so many mysteries that were still unsolved. How Knives knew about the Keystone and why he hadn't secured it himself was first among them. Then there was the mystery of the keystone itself. There was also the mystery of Meryls necklace and the keystone, what was up with that?

:_There's no doubt in my mind that the keystone definately reacts to Meryl's necklace_,: vash thought puzzling through it.

There were so many peices to the mystery and none of them fit in a way that made sense. Meryl was the most normal person he knew and yet, if the man from the silver tombstone was in fact her father, a thought that Vash was becoming more and more certain as time went on and further discrepencies revealed themselves then...

:_I guess I could try to look at it logically._:

Okay, well, reasons that the man might be Meryl's father... his last name is Stryfe as is hers. He lived in a town near Crackback Canyon and Meryl said she grew up near here. He was part of a project to try to find an alternate energy source rather than plants and Meryl said that her own father was part of such a venture. He's a scientist, and so was Meryls father. The timeline and ages add up about right. She said that she thought her father was dead but what if he'd just gone missing?

If events had happened like he said, and the town of Stryfe had been wiped out by a machine made to harvest and store human energy twelve years ago, Meryl could very well be the "Stryfe Child" that Vash had heard about on the sat feeds, the one who had been the sole survivor of an unexplained incident that had wiped out an entire town. Meryl had never mentioned loosing her father, but perhaps she had a hard time talking about it.

It was sad that after knowing each other for so long, she wouldn't open up a little more. Of course, that wasn't entirely fair, he hadn't told her everything either. He'd intimated that Knive's greatest problem with humanity was that his kind couldn't co-exist with humans because one would eventually devour the other and that was true... to an extent. Knives' real problem with humanity was not a matter of spiders and butterflies. He had discovered one day while hacking through the files on the ship and overiding the security protocols with Vash one day just what exactly the two of them were, or at least had come out of.

Plants were not a natural occurrence. They had been created by scientists playing god. They were an artificial "life form" a bio-organic machine. They had been written like a computer program, built like a spaceship. Thieu kin had been composed from the cells outwards by nano-technology. The materials that made up their "genetic" data was nothing more than a series of codes and protocols delivered to nano-bot "cells" that made up the substance of their blood and flesh and bones. He and Knives were never _supposed _to have existed, they were a fluke; Nature trying to interfere with the control of Man.

Once Knives had realized these facts he'd never been able to forgive humans for having naturally what should have been his by birth... the right to exist.

If anyone ever knew what the two of them were, Knives had felt, they'd have sealed him and his brother inside one of those bulbs and forced them to perform the function that thier kind had been created for. No matter how much Vash tried to reassure him otherwise (Rem being a very good example of what a human would NOT do to them) Knives wouldn't listen.

:_Meryl's right_,: Vash thought. :_He's afraid and acting badly, and then acting even worse so he can cover it up_.:

As if Vash didn't already understand that his brother was afraid. He might act like it sometimes, but Vash wasn't stupid. The fact that his brother was afraid and acting out of fear, Vash realized, did not excuse all the things that he had done. This latset crime of stealing Vash's Short Girl away from him was just one more item in a very very long list of crimes that his brother had committed. Vash was growing weary of finding excuses for him, of trying to explain his twins behavior even as he tried to prevent his brothers messes from happening. It was very very frustrating always being one step behind. Especially now, when Meryl's life and safety were at risk.

:_It still seems a little odd that Meryl would be related to a man like that and not be aware of what he can do_...:

Wait a minute.

Vash paused, looking at that thought from another angle. _Was _she unaware of it? Looking at it one way it seemed like it would be pretty unlikely that Meryl would be oblivious to her fathers abilities, Mister Stryfe had given every indication that he was open with his daughter about his abilities. If she was a blood-relation she'd had to have inherited them from her father.

:_Well, maybe whatever abilities her father has doesn't work for her_,: he thought logically.

That made sense, often times when a Psi had children by a Normal with no indication of psychic abilities in their bloodline the amount of talent in thier children was proportionally weaker. Maybe Meryl just took after her mother.

Vash sighed a little, nearly giving up. Meryl was parsimonious on the details at the best of times and Vash knew too little about the man who had supposedly agreed to act as the Plant Angels agent on the outside world. For a moment, Vash felt a little miffed about that; _he _was a good man, _he _could have done the same job for them if they'd asked him, there was no need to get another person involved.

:_yeah, but could you have done all that they likely asked of him while still looking for your brother and trying to dodge bounty hunters_?: a part of him asked.

Well, no, probably not.

:_He gave her that necklace and it reacts with the keystone_,: thought Vash, very much bothered by the puzzle.

Meryl had told him herself that her father had given her the necklace for safekeeping, and that she was never to loose it. She had entrusted it to him because she was afraid it would get damaged while they were exploring that cave together.

:_He must be her father_.:

But that was an awfully weird coincidence. Meryl's father, in penance for the sin of hubris (and wiping out an entire town, even with the best of intentions) undertakes the task of creating some kind of unknown and mysterious mechanism that's supposed to fix the world, supposedly at the behest of the Plant Angels (and Vash wasn't too sure about that, he'd have to ask one). The necklace that he gives to his daughter reacts with the Keystone to the terraforming device, leading them to the places where the rest of the pieces were supposed to be hidden. That would mean that her father had one day expected that Meryl herself would one day go out in search of the Keystone and gather the pieces.

:_And what about that puzzle_?: vash wondered to himself.

He was now more certain than ever that it was the kind of puzzle that no ordinary man could have figured out. it would have taken the intellect of a supergenius to solve the grid and a person that was capable of moving his hands so fast that one could literally dodge bullets. Meryl wasn't stupid, but she didn't have the intellect or the kind of scientific education capable of solving the puzzle in the allotted amount of time. She was just an ordinary woman, and the "key" to getting to the peice of the keystone was not something that could have been solved by an ordinary woman.

:_So then what does that say_?: he wondered to himself.

It seemed an awfully big coincidence that she would have met him at all, let alone be related to this other mystery he'd had no idea existed until now. He would have thought, that being what he was, Vash would know just about anything that went on on this planet, certainly he was accustomed to being the mysterious one. He was used to being the one with all of the secrets, who knew the ture details about the ships malfunction and crash-landing on this planet, about the ways humans had found to exist there. He was accustomed to being the one who hid things, rather than being the one who had things hidden from him. How could something of this magnitude have happened, practically right under his nose, and him not be aware of it?

Maybe they had hidden it from him. But Knives had spent the last forty or fifty years melded with the other Plant angels healing from July, he would certainly have known about it. Wouldn't he?

Maybe they had hidden it from Knives too. Vash and Knives had a strong twin bond, and when it came to using their powers knives was the more proficient of the two of them. Perhaps they had hidden their plan to make a terraformation device from Knives by hiding it from Vash. One little human vessel would probably go unnoticed in the general melee of their kin's Song, perhaps they had chosen Meryls father so that they could slip their little plan by under the radar.

That explained her father, and the keystone, but it did not in any way explain Meryl. Her necklace seemed to be the key to activating the compass that pointed to the places where the keystone was kept hidden, so then logically, it should have presumably been Meryl herself who would have sought out the parts of the keystone. However she seemed utterly unaware of anything unusual going on around her. She had never given any indication that she was going to one day go off on a quest that would change the world. In fact she seemed completly oblivious to even the oddest of occurances, and a woman who was accustomed to having the unusual in her life would have known what to look for. Vash didn't think she was so good an actress that could have hidden something like that from him.

:_It makes sense that the Angels wouldn't want me or Knives to know about it, but... why wouldn't Meryl know_?"

Surely her father had left some kind of clue behind for his daughter, other than the necklace itself, so she could go out and fulfil the destiny he had apparently carved out for her. it didn't seem likely that her father would spend all of this time and effort on creating a terraformation device, splitting the keystone to it into several parts and hiding them in booby-trapped dungeons, and then simply not tell the person who was supposed to gather them up that she was supposed to do so! it left too much to chance. If Meryl never realized the duty her father had left for her and the peices of the keystone went ungathered then all of her father's efforts were for nothing because she'd never realize that she was supposed to be looking for the keystone so the terraformation device could be (presumedly) activated. That was just stupid, it would be like creating a great city capable of supporting the population of the planet out in the sands and then not telling anyone about it. It didn't make sense.

:_And even if she had somehow stumbled across her fathers legacy by accident and somehow discovered where the Stryfe fragment was hidden, how would she have gotten to it_?: he wondered.

The necklace hadn't acted like it was any sort of key, and the puzzle-game he'd had to work through to get into the keystone chamber wasn't something she could have solved on her own. Meryl was smart (when she didn't rush into things) but she wasn't quite that smart, and there was no way that simple human reflexes would have been able to move fast enough to solve the puzzles in the allotted time. it was a contradiction. Deciding to take the fact that Meryl and the man who'd created the device were in fact father and daughter as a given, vash mapped the points out logically.

:_Point; Meryls father entrusted a stone to his daughter that, when joined with a peice of the keystone, will enable her to locate all of the others. Counter-point; reaching this peice of the keystone would have been impossible for Meryl as the bearer of the stone to access_.:

Was she meant to give the necklace to someone else?

:_That was what wound up happening anyway_,: Vash realized.

He was one of the few, perhaps the only person, capable of solving that puzzle to get into the keystone chamber. He had wound up with the keystone in his possession just as Knives had all but ordered him to investigate it. He wouldn't be able to find the other peices without the compass made by Meryls necklace, and necklace that her father had entrusted to her.

:_It's just **not adding up**_,: he thought in frustration.

And yet it was, if one thought that maybe she was _supposed _to deliver the necklace to him.

:_But having her meet with me was just a coincidence_,: he thought.

Wasn't it?

:_She's just an insurance girl who was sent out by her boss to keep an eye on me_,: he thought.

The fact that they had become fast friends over the course of events was irrelevant to the matter. It was just a _coincidence _that Meryl, out of every employee working there, would be sent out to keep an eye on him. It was only a _coincidence _that she of all people would be related to a man who had seemingly managed to build a terraformation device and had given to his only daughter the key to locating all of the peices that would make that device work. And it was just a _coincidence _that the stone should happen to fall into his possession at the time when he would need it most, and he was perhaps the one man who would have what it took to solve the puzzle, reach the keystone chamber and take the keystone out. A _coincidence _that the two of them should be fast friends (and perhaps a little more than friends) the way they were.

:_She was sent by her boss at Bernardellis_,: he thought, frowning a little.

No-way was her boss, whoever he was, in Knives' employ, so it couldn't be his brother manipulating events from behind the scenes as he so often did. Besides, if it had been Knives doing he wouldn't have sent Meryl to Vash, he'd have brought her in under his control in the fist place. It was Wolfwood that had been sent as a double agent. Besides, the idea of Meryl as a Gung-Ho Gun was laughable... or it would have been if the idea didn't send a little chill down his spine. Wolfwood had very _obviously _been an above-par gunman, Meryl was what he would have called... competent. She wasn't a great shot, but she wasn't a bad one either; her skills were adequate to the task. She probably considered skills at gunmanship a neccessity out in the wilds so she kept in practice but it wasn't something she spent more time than neccessary with. No, Knives wasn't involved with his having met Meryl. It was just a coincidence.

:_Still seems a little odd to be just a coincidence_,: Vash thought, unsettled by it.

His eye fell on the pink suitcase that contained all of her worldly possessions (or at least all of the ones she traveled with) and a thought occured to him. he could probably find proof that meryl and that man that had created the terraformation device were related if he looked in there. She had to have photos of her loved ones packed away that she could carry with her. Lord knew Milly did, and would happily show anyone who asked at the drop of a coin. Vash had seen her family portrait... he had seen and been a little visually over-whealmed by just how very many people could fit inside a frame. "The youngest of six" just barely began to cover it. Aside of her mother and father she had aunts and uncles (both paternal and maternal) cousins enough to populate a small (or even a fairly large) town, nieces, nephews, second cousins and so on, plus in-laws.

Meryl's family didn't seem to be a very large one, but unlike Vash she couldn't have just come out of no-where and he already knew she wasn't an orphan so chances were that she had a picture of her next of kin somewhere in there. Unfortunately, also within the confines of the pink suitcase was her clothing, including those lacey intimates she put on under the various layers of office garb she wore on a daily basis. he'd have to go through those, likely, to get to what he was looking for.

:_Meryl would kill me if she ever found out that i'd went pawing through her underthings_,: Vash thought.

All of the various reasons why this was so not a good idea flashed through his head. he'd been raised better than to invade someone's privacy by pawing through thier personal possessions.

:_But I have to know for certain_,: he justified, hunkering down in front of the suitcase and looking for the head of the zipper. It was locked by a flimsy little lock that he had open in less that a blink.

He snorted in a manner that suggested the words "it figures" when he lifted the top of the suitcase and peered warily at its contents. The clothes were all folded and rolled neatly to maximize the use of space. Well he wouldn't have expected a woman like Meryl Stryfe to just cram things in willy-nilly and sit on it to fasten down the lid.

Vash carefully lifted out the neatly folded articles, promising himself that he wasn't going to peek at certain ones among them... a promise which he promptly broke when he "accidentally" dropped a small pile of them and had to refold them. It was an accident! That didn't make him a pervert, it wasn't like he was putting them on his head or anything weird like that. Though he was wickedly tempted to keep the pair of black lace panties that he found crammed way down in the corner of the suitcase. A woman didn't buy black lace panties unless she wanted someone to see her in them. He restrained himself and with another twinge of guilt (after his fun was over with) started going through the articles underneath the clothes. Articles for daily use like the bathroom kit, towel and various odds and ends for travel were stored away in the outside pockets, it was in the depths of the bottom of the suitcase that he would find the more personal items that she didn't use much but at the same time couldn't bring herself to leave behind.

Part of him said _paydirt_! triumphantly as he pulled out a battered, tolled leather-bound book that was obviously a journal. His hands moved of their own accord while his mind tried to yell at him to stop what he was doing right that instant because this went beyond a serious invasion of privacy. Meryl would be mad about the panties but after smacking him around a bit she'd cool off and forgive him, reading her diary constituted a serous breach of what anyone would consider good behaviour. She'd be a lot longer forgiving him for that than she would for pawing through her underwear. But his eyes were already, seemingly of thier own accord, scanning down the page.

Her handwriting was neat and her entries all very clear, marked with neat dates adn often with locations as well. Probably a habit she'd gotten into from writing her reports. Her journal, it seemed, contained all of the things that her reports left out.

**_Dear Journal,_**

**_I don't think I like the way Mister Wolfwood keeps eying Milly. I know its none of my business, really, she's only my junior partner and i technically can't involve myself with her personal life outside of where it affects our job, but you could also technically say that since he is a friend of our assignment, Vash, that any change in the dynamics of our groups relationships do affect our work. I haven't really said anything, because... well, emotions really aren't things i like to get involved in, though from grade school on up people always seem to like to tell me about thier relationship problems, I guess it's because I'm discrete, they know if they talk to me I won't gossip about it to anyone else. I guess what makes me trustworthy also sometimes makes me a target too. But anyway, I don't like the way he keeps looking at her when he thinks she doesn't notice. I can't tell if she does and is too nice to say anything or if she's genuinely clueless, it's so hard to tell with her sometimes._**

**_Vash is like that too. I have a hard time with him distinguishing the things he says and the things he doesn't say. This is going to sound utterly crazy but if i can't say it here then i can't say it anywhere. Sometimes i wonder whether or not he's... well, let me put it like this. One time we were all goofing off down at a bar somewhere, i wasn't drinking because of my usual reasons but everyone else was pretty sloshed. Vash was in a group of people who were all caroling some song about the virtues of having a penis and one singer spilled his drink all over everyone but somehow managed to miss vash. At first I figued that he was just lucky until I looked over and noticed that the splatter of the beer made a perfect circle around him. That's not all. Sometimes, when he's acting like his goofy self, getting stuck in wierd places, he'll act really really clumsy and i always wonder how someone so clumsy could possibly be such a good shot (I figured he was some sort of idiot savant). But then one night, when i got stuck doing the dishes to help cover his tab that evening (I wasn't going to spend my jobs expense money bailing him out of a night of too much drinking) he was acting the fool like usual; running around breaking things, and spilling stuff, with his nonsense, foolishness, mayhem and carrying on, but i noticed when he went to pick up a plate he held it just a slpit second too long before he dropped it. he'd obviously _**_meant _**_to knock it over, but why would he have let it go if he already had a grip on it? I thought at first I was just imaginging things until I saw him do it again. There's definately something odd about him and I'm not just talking about him going out of his way to cause trouble that night (he was sulking because I made him help wash). And then there's Augusta. No matter how hard i try to come up with an explanation I can't come up with a logical one. Milly can be uncannily observant, but Vash I'm beginning to think, is just uncanny._**

Vash paused after having read the entry and very firmly closed the book before he could read any more. Wolfwood had always known what he was because he worked (nominally) for his brother, but the fact that meryl, the most prosaic woman on the planet had had her suspicions was a bit of a surprise. As for Milly... well, what could anyone say? She was Milly.

Vash turned back tot he suitcase and continued to fish through it finally finding what he was looking for. There was a small frame-book with pictures in it. it started to play music when he opened the front cover, ironically enough it was a music-box version of the song Rem had loved.

:_That's deffinately him_,: vash thought, nodding in confirmation as the face and form of the man who was obviously Meryl's father matched up to both the man from the town of Stryfe and the hologram form the Keystone chamber.

:_Aw! she looked like a little angel_!: Vash exclaimed after seeing the picture of her and her father when she'd been a little girl. Dark hair worn long in two braids on either side of her head, pale skin darker with a tan from the sun.

He flipped through the few remaining pictures. There was one of an older man and woman with stiff postures and very neat and tidy clothes, rather like Meryls. Then there was a picture of a boy of maybe about sixteen or seventeen with Red hair, grey eyes and a definite aura of mischeif about him. A crush or old boyfriend perhaps? That notion was quickly quashed when he turned the last page and found a portrait of the two older people and the boy standing together. Unlike the picture with her father, there was very little warmth in the photo. If Vash were to guess, those were the ones who had adopted her after her father had disappeared.

That was one mystery solved, twenty or so more to go. Vash decided that he'd had enough wading through things that he didn't know enough about and that he was going to take a nap until they got to thier next destination.

* * *

**It's a little dense but it needed to be done. I hope you all enjoyed the update.**


	32. Resonate

Her knees felt weak, and her stomach growled demandingly. The punishing heat seemed to wrap around her like a hot shroud, smothering her. Even the never-ceasing wind seemed like it would knock her over. Meryl wasn't sure what the hell was wrong with her. Dazzle-stars faded in and out with blurred grey around the edge of her vision and it felt like her body could barely hold her own weight, not to mention the weight of the pack on her back, but Meryl was certain that she had made journeys such as this before without feeling quite this bad. She shouldn't be feeling this weak, but she was.

:Do i have heat-stroke?: she wondered to herself. She put a hand up to feel her face and tested her pulse on her wrist with the other. Her skin felt normal and her pulse wasn't erratic or thready so it couldn't be that. Her stomach gave a particularly loud growl, almost more of a snarl, and Meryl looked down in surprise at its vehemence. She had just eaten a full meal about an hour ago, she couldn't be hungry already! She had instructed all of them to eat well and as much as they could hold for the morning, for a variety of reasons. The more they ate, the longer they could travel without having to stop and eat again, it was less they would have to carry on thier backs, and hunting was generally easier than finding water. So she'd had a full meal that morning, practically full to bursting, and now her body was telling her that she was nearly starving. Her stomach had that empty pit feeling, like it was trying to wrap itself around her backbone and squeeze, and not only that she was getting dizzy and light headed. Meryl wasn't certain what was wrong with her, but if she didn't stop, she was going to fall over.

"Hold up," she instructed to Remembrance and Angelina. She quickly fell to her knees. Her vision greying again around the edges.

Remembrance hurried over, a concerned look on her face.

"You shouldn't push yourself so hard," Remembrance chided mildly taking out Meryl's (now nearly full) canteen and uncapping it.

"It's nothing I haven't done before," Meryl replied sharply, nettled by the implication of weakness.

"I think there's something wrong with me," she added in the next breath, her tone milder, even a little conciliatory for snapping at the taller woman.

"You're probably getting heatstroke," Remembrance muttered, pulling up on one of her eyelids and checking her eyes. "Your eyes look a little dialated, but its hard to tell in all this sunlight."

"I already checked for that," Meryl mumbled, annoyed at the implication that she was stupid enough not to have checked for that first thing. Even the youngest school child knew the dangers of heatstroke and how to check for the first signs of it. Perhaps the hunger was making her irritable, well, more irritable than usual.

"My heartbeat's strong and steady, breathing normal, I'm sweating just fine and I'm not nauseous, no muscle cramps either."

"What about headache or dizziness?" Remembrance interjected quickly.

"I've had those two for last while without the danger of heatstroke. Those seem to be a side-effect of all these weird things happening to me. I just feel weak and hungry, and I shouldn't be feeling either of those. I just ate and rested a while ago, I should be good to go for a few hours yet."

Remembrance frowned for a moment adn dug in her pack for a meal-bar. Meryl tried not to grimice in disgust; she hated those things, you could chew them all day and they still tasted like sand. Still she took it without complaint, even remembered to thak her for it. Despite the fact that she was hungry, she didn't want to eat it, it was just more she was going to have to hunt for later.

Her stomach however didn't care for her tastes, and all but forced her body to devour the thing. nearly in one bite. meryl had to almost physically force herself to take smaller bites and chew slowly, it was a well known fact that eating too quickly in this kind of heat would cause a person to vomit it right back up. So she ate it slowly, interspersing it with sips of water. The hunger abated a little and so did the feeling of weakness. it felt like she had low blood sugar levels but she just didn't see how that could be, she had just eaten an hour ago. A glance at her near full canteen brought a notion to the fore of her mind.

"I think I might have an idea about what it is that's making me feel hungry and dizzy," Meryl said a moment later, the three of them resting in a circle under an impromptu awning made by their bodies and Angelina's wind-cloak. She held up the canteen.

"I'm going to try something real quick, just on a hunch."

Meryl closed her eyes and focused her attention inward, locating the her channels and the grid she'd made. it was still active since she hadn't cut it off, and the power flowing through her channels from the source energist was a comfortable trickle still. Instead of feeling white-hot and burning as her first attempts had felt, the power streaming through her channels was little more annoying than a slight static-shock. I t was distracting, but something she could ignore. Meryl mentally zeroed in on the grid and unwove it, detatching the source energist from the node and her channels. Her channels faded back to a smokey grey from a soft moonlight white and fell back to their proper places. A moment later she felt a little better, no longer quite so dizzy or lightheaded. it felt, in essence, like someone with low blood-sugar having taken something sweet to balance it out. She nodded firmly to herself and brought herself out of the light trance she was in.

"That's what it was alright," Meryl said aloud to Angelina and Remembrance.

"What what was?" Remembrance asked, completely lost in a sea of non-sequiter.

"That weakness and dizziness wasn't from heat stroke," Meryl replied. "The grid I wove to refill our canteens? I wove it so that it would slowly and steadily fill them over a period of time so that my channels wouldn't get burned by trying to channel too much energy too fast, and possibly kill me. Well i didn't realize this but even a grid that works slowly still drains something from me, it just does it in smaller increments rather than right away. That's why I was hungry so soon after eating, I'm certain that my body was trying to replace the energy that the grid was draining from me."

"Oh," remembrance said. "Well that's not the way it should be working. it's not supposed to do any harm to you at all. When your brother draws from his bondmate he can junction and channel all day and not feel a thing. he's never had this kind of weakness before, especially not from a small grid."

Before Meryl could get miffed at that Remembrance held up a qualifying hand

"But of course, your situations are very different. Marcus' bondmate would automatically replace any energy that he might be losing when he channels, and having the bond in the first place automatically means that the energy for Angelina isn't going to hurt him. When you channel from an energist you actually have to fight to control the power and keep it from hurting you. Plus he's already transitioned over, and you're still only an ordinary, well mostly ordinary, woman."

Meryl grunted at that and rose to her feet. So there she was, _not _bonded, _not _transitioned over, and apparently inadequate for the task at hand. Still, for all of her disadvantages, she'd done pretty well so far.

"Let's get going," Meryl said brusquely. "It doesn't seem like Angelina senses anyone, but you never can tell. She might be so concentrated on her bondmate that she'd simply ignoring anything else. Either way It's safer to assume that someone will be coming after us. We should keep moving. Drink freely and as often as you can, keep hydrated. I'll make another grid when you run out of water, as long as I keep my blood sugar up, it shouldn't be a problem.

:You hope, meryl: she thought at herself. part of that statement had felt a lot like a bluff. it was that old sibling rivalry rearing its ugly head again, that feeling of competion that naturally arose between all siblings, no matter how close, of "anything you can do, i can do better." meryl shook her head at herself as she started off. This wasn't a game, and Remembrance was right, thier situations were vastly different.

:_I'll just have to learn to work within my limitations_,: she told herself.

She had no intention of transtioning over, and certainly no desire to bond off!

Without warning a strange sensation overcame Meryl. Her body froze up and there was a soft buzzing in her ears and all along her_self_. It wasn't at all like the time she'd been taken over by Legato, this was _way _different. It felt more like the times when she'd been resonating empathically with her father or later on with Vash after thier separate tragedies had befallen them. In many ways empathy, the mere connection of emotions, was far more intimate than simply hearing a persons thoughts, and with a Resonant, that intimacy was doubled, for during Resonance they didn't just feel that persons emotions, for a moment sometimes it was almost like they _became _that person. It was dangerous. Her father had once explained to her that in a Bonded pair they were not separate entities but one seamless whole, like pouring milk into coffee what was once combined could not be undone. That was the danger of a bond and that was probably why Angelina was in such pain now... something was happeneing to Meryls brother. As if her thoughts had conjured him up, Meryl felt her blood bond with her brother suddenly snap into place.

Meryl felt herself flung out of her own body and momentarily lost the sense that was "Meryl" in her own mind. She found herself in a cold white room, naked, shivering and suspended in the middle of the room by two chains attached to the ceiling at opposite ends of the room. Her arms were spread and her body hung like a pendulum between them forming a Y shape. Her arms and shoulders and wrists ached from unwillingly maintaining her weight. Every inch of her flesh burned and stung, and the pain was so great she just wanted to sob. It rolled over her in waves, sometimes seeming to ebb and offer the hope that it might actually go away, only to return as her mind and body could no longer repress it.

God she wished she could just end it all! She'd been there for... she didn't know how long. Days, weeks, it had felt like years! Always there was a person trying her, testing her, asking questions. Always there was a presence on the outside of her mind forever probing and testing, trying to gain access to something that was no longer hers to give away. Her Channels were safe, but they seemed detirmined to gain access to them by breaking her soul and body. Why couldn't they understand that the bonding was irreversible and that once bonded her channels could belong to no-one else for the rest of his life?

Wait... his?

Meryl abruptly got a disorienting feeling, that of being in two places at once. She "knew" that her body was not there in a cold white room somewhere, but free and hurrying through the desert to find her brother. But the other world she was in felt so real.

-_Meryl_?-

Her brother's voice resounded hopefully through his head, no, her head. No wait...

Meryl couldn't tell the difference.

_-It's resonance, you **know **about that_.-

Oh yes, Meryl knew. Her father had once tried to explain it to her and warned her of the dangers. Resonance wasn't a meeting of minds, but a melding of them. The individual consciousnesses were no longer separate, they were one and they were the other. If she wasn't careful it could stay that way. She got a feeling of negation from her brother at her thought, he was already bonded off to another, she might be able to pick up on his resonance but that was only because of what they were. She was in no danger of being bonded to him, certainly.

"Please sister," she felt their lips whisper. "Help me."

-_I'm coming brother, just hang on_,- she assured him. he let go, and like a rubber band that had been stretched out, Meryl snapped back into her own body and "woke" to herself with a start. Angelina looked over at her, and the two of them shared a nod. They would get there, and they would rescue him.

:_And the ones who did this to him will get whats coming to them_: Meryl promised herself, a burn of anger awakening in her belly.

It wasn't hatred, but she _was _a woman who liked her pound of flesh, and threats to her family, to her brother whom she loved and cherished, would not go unanswered. There would be a reckoning, no matter who it was or what stood in her way.

* * *

"Hey boss!" one of the minions in the dashing flashy uniform that he had all of his loyal lads wear (because if it wasn't bright and flashy, what was the point?) called over to him.

"We've got a problem here!"

The tall, broad man with the enormous turbine-neon shoulder-pads looked over at the rude fellow who was interrupting his contemplation of a new way to make his mark on history. He'd come a long way towards establishing his name, he was the infamous bandit Brilliant Dynamites Neon and the Bad Lads (who were his gang). They were the terror of the Sourthern Strip, the scourge of the Whispering Sands, the brilliant stars who shone brighter than the suns... okay, so he was making that last bit up, but still, it was pretty well known that in the world of steamer-caravan raiding BDN and the Bad Lads were quite the force to be reckoned with. So why the hell was he out there in the middle of no-where with nothing going on that would make his name any bigger? Because his name wasn't going to get any flashier until he'd found a Grendel!

Well, it had made that guy Beowulf famous... now there was a man he could _relate _to! He'd claimed his fame and made his name so bright that history never forgot it. And that was what BDN wanted, to have the stories of his prowess and skill told and retold to countless generations long after he was dead. He figured one of the best ways to go about it was to start off by beating the legend at his own game. So he'd taken his lads and went out into the wastes near the Conrad Range where some of the original explorers, the poor sods, had discovered the predators they'd named after the monster of legend. Grendels, according to the few later studies of them that had managed to survive, were massive, fast and could eat just about anything. They were the dragons of this age and once BDN actually slew one and presented the corpse, his name would shine brighter than St George.

:_Hmph! Maybe they'll make a saint outta me_: he thought, oddly liking the idea.

Saint Brilliant Dynamites Neon had a nice ring to it, if he did say so... and he _did_. All that was left was to find one of the wreched buggers and kill it. Like the mighty hero, there was absolutely no doubt in BDN's mind that he was more than a match for the beast.

"What is it?" he snapped, annoyed at being called out of his reverie about his future fame and glory.

"We're not picking up on any Grendels, but we've got something else approaching...

BDN looked over in the direction his little stooge was pointing, expecting to see some kind of behemoth, or at the very least a herd of sandworms coming from that way. instead, all he could see, watery through the heat haze and the glare of sun on sand was the silhouette of a single man wearing a long white trenchcoat. He nearly hit the henchman from the force of his let-down. He was getting all excited over one guy? Clearly he hadn't been with the crew for very long. it looked like it was time to show the newbie his prowess.

"Well well well, alright!" he said, straightening up and checking his holster. "Alright! Alright, alright alright!"

He turned to go and meet the interloper intending on issuing the usual challenge; the man could meet him in a straight duel and let thier bullets decide who shone the brightest (and if he gave a good showing, BDN might even graciously let him go) or he could try and walk by and face the gauntlet. BDN smiled, things had been getting boring around here, and the men had been starting to complain about the lack of female company now that there weren't any steamer robberies in the works.

Before he could give the order however, BDN felt the words freeze and die on his lips as the control that he'd had for all of his life over his own body was suddenly ripped from him. BDN watched in confused facination as he began to move without willing it so. A strange haze settled over his mind and it was like he could see two golden eyes staring at him forcing his will upon him.

He and his band would seek through the desert and find three women, then he would capture and return them to him.

Of course he struggled, he was Brilliant Dynamites Neon, and making his fame and his destiny had nothing to do with obeying some punk who couldn't get a girl, let alone three of them. But BDN found to his consternation and then to his rising fear that he had now met a force against which he had no defense and he was not a match for. He could take on anyone in a straight fight, it was how he'd made his name, but he wasn't even a bit-soldier on this battlefeild... he didn't even know the rules of engagement. For the first time in his life, he had no choice but to obey.

He and his lads were sent out to search for the women that thier new master had demanded they find. BDN hated it, but so no method of refusing, he couldn't even control his own body. He sensed a sort of smug satisfaction form the one controlling him and caught the edge of a thought while being equally certain that the controller, who hadn't deigned to give them his name, had meant him to overhear; once they had finished with the task assigned to them, they would have thier life energies fed to the device and the Master's plan until they were dead.

* * *

**Yay BDN! Well... maybe not seeing as he's now in trouble. You all get a two fer now because I was too lazy to edit and post last time I posted.**


	33. Like a Bad Penny

Vash slept himself out and awoke feeling a little groggy. He debated simply rolling over and going back to sleep, hoping that the world would leave him alone but it had never done so before and Vash didn't think that it was going to start now. He levered himself from his stomach sleeping-position over onto his back and stared at the underside of the bunk above him and let his mind wander for a time.

Again that nagging, dark whisper disturbed his thoughts. It was never very far away from the surface of his mind now. In the time before Legato the darkness that was compounded of all of the anger he felt inside at the pain and suffering he was forced to endure by his brother had been manageable. He'd been able to hold it at bay, tuck it away for the most part and seal it inside a locked box in his mind. It had only on very very rare occasions manifested itself as Diablo, and even then Vash had been able to control it somewhat... not anymore though. It was stronger somehow, more focused and detirmined, and it wanted something. There was some instinct in Vash that had been awakened and part of him was searching for something. Deep down he _knew _something that his mind wasn't aware of, and the anger and rage inside of him was darkly angry that it was being denied him. Again he felt the urge to blow off the quest his brother had sent him on and go after Meryl.

:_No_!: Vash resolutely told himself.

He knew his brother well enough to know that if Vash went against Knives' will in favor of her, then his brother, likely in a fit of pique, would order her death and his minions would only be too glad to carry it out. No, if Vash wanted his Short Girl back safe and unharmed then he had no choise but to play by the rules.

:_And when I do get her back safe_: he informed that tiny darkly mutinous little voice inside of him. :_I'm sending her home_.:

Vash could feel by the dark pang in his chest that the other part of him didn't like that notion. At all. That dark little voice inside of hm rebelled at the idea of him sending her away, his inner thoughts trying to convince him otherwise, trying to twist and turn his thoughts about.

He didn't _need _to send her away, in fact she'd be in even more danger if he _did _send her away. Knives had demonstrated time and again that he was more than willing to harm innocent bystanders just because they knew him and the closer Vash was to them, the more Knives liked to get them out of his way. He'd likely by now cottoned on to the fact that Vash valued her life, his dear brother probably had her on his list of people to go after should Vash take it upon himself to misbehave. If Vash should send her away then he might be putting her in greater danger than she already was when she was at his side. At least when she was nearby Vash could protect her to a degree, if she was out there on her own then Knives would be free to pursue his vendetta through her with no intervention from Vash. Vash thought again of the severed finger that Knives had to graciously sent to him and felt that dark anger spike up again. It was a very frustrating catch twenty-two; if he sent her away she'd be in danger because Vash couldn't protect her and Knives already knew about her, but if he kept her with him then she was still in danger even though Vash could protect her somewhat he'd most likely be going into dark, scary places.

Vash frowned mulling that over, it was a good point, but Vash wasn't so certain that he wasn't just trying to have things his own way and coming up with reasons to justify what he wanted to do. He _wanted _Meryl with him, even though he knew that thier feelings couldn't work out in a happy way... the optimistic veiw was that she would die of old age and that was only the _bright _side, she'd still be dead and he'd lost so many and so much before her. He knew that he could have her for but a time and that time wouldn't last forever. Vash wasn't even certain he could be with her _at all_. He wasn't certain he _should _be with her. Aside of the vast age difference and the fact that she was mortal and he was not (so much) there was also his brother. Knives would not be pleased at finding that his brother had become enamored of a human woman. Vash knew that loving her would be the equivalent of painting a big, flashing-red bullseye on her pristine white uniform and announcing open season on smaller fragile insurance girls to Knives and whatever other Gung-Ho Guns he'd had left lying around. Maybe Vash was just getting greedy.

_:It's a moot point right now_: he told himself sternly. :_She's not here and Knives has her, and if I don't get moving on finding those stupid keystones it will never be a point at all, because he'll have killed her.:_

He could decide what was best done about their not-quite-relationship once he'd gotten her back safe. In order to do that, he had to find the keystone pieces first. Vash was less than certain that it was a good idea to do that, or at least that it was a very good idea to hand the finished product off to his brother. Knives surely only planned to do something unpleasant with it, something probably involving the destruction of mankind. Vash didn't see that it was a good idea to go helping him do that.

_:But if i don't give him the finished Keystone, he'll hurt and or kill Mery_l: he argued with himself.

It seemed like another imossible situation, just as Knives had most likely planned it. Vash was already beyond tired of putting up with these things.

His morning woolgathering was interrupted by a soft chiming noise of someone pushing the ringer on the keypad to his quarters. Vash reluctantly answered.

"Come in," he said.

He already knew who it was, he could sense her. Sure enough, when the door slid open Vash could see Jessica standing in the doorway looking cutely contrite, holding something wrapped in brown paper with a red bow behind her back.

"Hey," she said quietly.

"Hey," he replied back in a neutral tone. He wasn't happy that she had tagged along without permission and she knew it, but Vash didn't believe in rubbing salt in a wound when she was obviously sorry.

"I don't want you to be mad at me anymore, I'm sorry," she apologized, putting on that little contrite pout she'd learned could get her out of just about anything.

"What are you sorry for?" vash asked patiently, for once feeling every bit as old as his _real _years.

Jessica fancied herself as something of a free spirit; for all of her life up there in the safe controlled environment of the old SEEDs ship she'd been patted and indulged, told how cute and sweet she was, and given free run of the entire premises; no-one saw any reason to stop her because all of the dangerous non-peaceful articles within the ship had been dismantled or sealed away long ago. It had resulted in making her a little spoiled, certainly she could be headstrong about getting whatever it was she wanted. She had no real experience with the world and probably thought it was safe enough to go anywhere she wanted just because, aside of the time with the Gung Ho Gun, she'd never really been exposed to danger before.

"I'm sorry you're mad at me?" she tried, holding out the present.

Just as he'd thought, she'd completely missed the point. Vash cringed inwardly a little at what he had to do, he really didn't want to hurt her feelings, but if she didn't learn now then she'd be in far worse trouble later. He couldn't afford to simply forgive her right away until she'd learned what she'd done wrong (and that forgiveness couldn't always be bought with a winning smile and a present).

"I think you should go somewhere and think about it until you've figured out why I'm mad at you," he said as gently, but firmly, as possible.

Her lips trembled and her eyes filled up with tears but Vash made himself remain firm despite the auutomatic desire at the sight of tears to give in and give her whatever she wanted to make her happy again. They didn't have time to nurse her ego, not when someone else's life was on the line... not when _Meryl's_ life was on the line.

"Vash!" she cried, tears saturating her voice as she flung the package at his head. "You idiot!"

She turned on her heel and ran out of the room. Vash listened to her retreating footsteps pounding down the hall toward the doc's lab. Vash wasn't certain that the Doc, now that he had his hands full with fascinating new things, would find time for her. Vash shook his head; she'd either learn or she wouldn't, right then he couldn't take the time to hold her hand and nurse her through it.

He climbed onto his feet and changed into a clean armor-suit, pulling on ordinary clothes over it running a hand through his hair which had flopped over to one side, still sticking up. Out of long, customary habit, he fixed it. He'd sort of been looking forward to changing it a bit in preparation to the new life he'd been planning to start but it seemed that it was not to be. The world still needed Vash the Stampede for a little longer.

Out of curiosity, Vash unwrapped the present that Jessica had offered to him as a peace offering and cringed a bit inwardly when he unknotted the bow and the paper folded back to reveal a neatly folded pile of red fabric.

_Like a bad penny_.

Vash pulled out the long duster and shook it out. She'd mended the missing sleeve and the bullet hole in the sholder and the fabric had been washed clean of his blood. It was, almost miraculously, good as new. Vash knew that it was mostly due to the polymer of the coat itself, it had been specially formed to meld-patch easily and he usually kept scraps of the same red fabric and a repair-warmer in his duffle... of course Meryl hadn't known that when she'd stitched it back up. With her own two hands. When he'd gone out into the desert to fight his brother his keen senses had been able to pick up the light scent of her along that shoulder where she'd held it to repair the coat, and it had been a surprising comfort on the lonely journey out to meet the inevitable conflict. Vash looked along the shoulder for the neat repair stitches she'd left behind and was very disappointed to note that they'd been removed and melt-repaired.

Vash sighed a little, he wasn't really looking forward to putting back on the coat. True, it was comfortable, worn to fit him over the course of many years like an old friend. The comfort of its familiarity was nice, but at the same time it was also undeniably a rather large and conspicuous bullseye. He didn't really want to have to waste time dodging bounty hunters.

:_There probably aren't any bounty-hunters out here_: he thought to himself trying to ignore the minor pang of dread he felt at the idea of resuming his role as Vash the Stampede, Gunsoke's most notorious outlaw with a long list of insulting nicknames appended to his name.

It was who he was, but he'd been looking forward to changing that. He'd been looking forward to having a little peace. He'd been looking forward to just being Vash-the-man, instead of the outlaw. But now, because his stupid brother decided to to keep up his stupid vendetta, Vash was going to have to put on the coat once more and be Vash the Stampede. He felt decidedly cheated. He felt even more cheated when he thought of the nice, cute little house that Meryl had had all ready for him when he came back. Pancakes, and shopping at the market... Vash didn't really care that he'd been essentially playing house like a five-year old, it had been _fun _dammit!

The interlude time he'd spent with Sheryl and Lina as part of their little family in that tiny town in the middle of no-where had been nice too, but, like the sword of Damocles Vash had known that his brother was out there somewhere and would have to be dealt with eventually and that he'd eventually have to leave the sanctuary they offered. But when he'd fought and had finally defeated Knives, Vash had thought that his days as Vash the Stampede were over for good. The fact that he'd been mistaken was more than a little irritating.

But he was out in the middle of no-where right then. He could put off having to don that coat. Just for a little while longer.

Vash left his quarters, coat safely stowed away inside.


	34. The Way it is With Siblings

No longer wandering the sands with the somewhat aimless purpose of mere escape, Meryl had quickened their pace to a brisk walk in the direction of her brother. Angelina, inhuman at even the best of times, with endurance and strength vastly far above the more meager resources of a humans, needed no coaxing in order to reach her bondmate more quickly. Remembrance however was having greater difficulties. Clearly unaccustomed to desert travel, she shriveled up in the heat and the other two were forced to stop far more frequently than they would clearly have liked to in order for her to catch her breath. It was also pretty clear that not only was she unaccustomed to being in the desert, but she was also, while seeming on the outside in good enough physical form, actually out of shape. She couldn't keep a good pace for a very long time without panting for breath and folding under, nor could she go for long distances without stopping even at a fast walk. And the extra burden of carrying supplies seemed to weigh on her as well. The two of them cut back their pace and paused to help her as often as their own impatience to help Marcus, the missing brother (or bondmate), would let them.

A honed sense of purpose and iron determination that had gotten Meryl Stryfe through bandits and sand-storms and disasters in the course of her travels stood her in good stead then, for it was taking all of her will power to force her into doing something she absolutely, at the end of all costs, _did not want to do_. She was drilling herself in using her new abilities.

Meryl knew that she couldn't possibly hope to defeat whoever it was that she would be facing that held her brother captive (and she had the sneaking dreadful feeling she knew exactly who it was) with only a helpless pacifist, an angel who couldn't fight (and seemed to be having trouble dealing with even living in the regular world and certainly didn't seem up to doing much besides taking basic commands like "walk" and "rest" and "sleep") and _no weapons_. If Meryl wanted to triumph, she was going to have to use whatever weapon came to hand (or whatever) and she couldn't afford to hold back because of squeamishness. She had no real choice but to use her new abilities.

:_At least I don't have to **like **them_: she thought to herself.

It wasn't any consolation to her though. She _didn't_ like them, but this world was full of things she didn't like, and she'd had to deal with all of them as well, so why should _this _be any differnt? Best to just get on with it.

So while they walked, instead of using her usual trick of getting through the desert, Meryl concentrated all of her thoughts and all of her will in drilling herself in the use of her new abilities. The most important thing was to get the basics down first, so all that afternoon she spent snapping into and out of that strange double-vision that let her see into things, and practicing her "reeling silk energy" on the little Source stones, pulling power from the source, bringing it under her control and then putting it back. Over and over again, until she tired.

Pulling energy from the stones stung like the dickens. The raw untamed power that came from the Source stones felt like wild lightning when she pulled it out. Meryl wasn't happy in her ability to do so in the first place. Put plainly, she really didn't want to be able to do it at all much less have to. But it was the only weapon she had, so she figured she'd better hone it until she could use it proficiently. So she pulled power, centered it, grounded it (much the same way that an electrician might anchor a live current) and then sealed a sheild around it.

Meryl wasn't sure where the knowledge of how to sheild came from, it creeped her out a little. More than a little actually. She decided, for her own peace of mind, that Angelina must have somehow whispered the knowledge of that particular ability into her subconciousness during that resonance mind-sharing thing she'd done when they first met. That thought was by far less scary than the thought that she already knew how to do it herself and had just forgotten (or been helped to forget).

The energy she pulled from out of the stones was wild, untamed and dificult to control, it burned along her channels in the same manner that whiskey burned her throat and stomach (one reason she avoided the vile hell-brew), only it didn't have the same soothing-warming sensation along with it. No, it just... burned. Grounding, centering and sheilding took away most of the sting, especially if she put more than one sheild up around it, but not all of it. her channels still smarted even after she pushed the energy back into the stone where she'd gotten it but Meryl wouldn't let up on herself. she needed to master this and master it quickly to where it felt like reflex, so that meant drill, over and over again until she could do it in her sleep.

She could only keep up the drawing off for so long. The act of drawing off the energy and then centering, grounding and shielding it was real work! It ate at her resources of energy, even though it was energy that she was controlling. Meryl didn't know what would happen if she attempted to channel stone-energy directly into her own personal Source, and she didn't care to try it. Something told her that the results would not make her a happy woman. She periodically took a break from the Source-work periodically to work in another aspect of her new found (and very much disliked) abilities. The sight.

"A change is as good as a rest" was her motto, and she had no intention of stopping herself from mastering everything she possibly could that might give her an edge in the fight ahead. So she worked on using that other seeing that allowed her to see the shift and flow of energy and into things, snapping in and out of the sight and studying the world around her with it.

She looked over at Remembrance and at herself with it, memorizing the spiralling twisting and turning pathways of energy that webbed throughout the body, memorizing which meridians fed into which dan'tien, memorizing the flow of the prime meridian that went down the spine through all three dan'tien. After the prime meridians, she learned the major meridians that branched off the prime, through the internal organs and in large thick ropes out into the limbs then cycled back into the dan'tien.

She didn't dare experiment on anyone but herself (and she already knew there was something odd about her) but after a little bit of practice she got a pretty good idea of how to "pull" on someone's meridians, using her channels to grasp a main meridian on a limb and temporarily freeze it or make it move at her direction like a puppeteer pulling on the strings of a marrionette. She's already learned that if she "snapped" the prime merdidian on a person it would render them unconscious. And she already knew that she could pinch a persons meridian, like a child would pinch a garden hose, to freeze it up and then tie it off to paralyze them without her having to be there to keep hold of the meridian with her channels. It was not a permanent condition, she knew, eventually their energy pathways would reassert themselves. It was however a marvelously useful quick-fix.

She switched back and forth between practicing with that weird alternate vision and the drawing off of power.

The movements that she used to draw off, center, ground and shield power taken from a Source stone were ones she shamelessly copied from those lessons in Tai'chi she'd taken as a child and young adult. "Reeling silk" was a drawing off motion that would enable her to pull from a Source while maintaining her own center. The pushing up of shields came from "Six Sealings with Four Closings," center became "preparing form," ground became "Bhuddas Warrior Attendant Pounds the Mortar". The familiarity of the movements made the drills somewhat more palatable to her, though she understood instinctively that the movements themselves weren't necessary. Remembrance surely saw her practicing as she walked but thankfully didn't comment; Meryl felt stupid enough doing them in the first place.

Even more annoying for her was that after the first while of drill it seemed to Meryl that she noticed a marked improvement in her ability. Drawing off the stinging, untamed (painful) power from a Source stone into her channels began to sting less. It also seemed that she was able to take in more energy for the same amount of pain after a while. Either it was that her channels were getting numb from the sting or the excerpts were actually increasing her capacity to manage. Meryl didn't like _either _option to be truthful. Still, she'd had to do many things before that she hadn't necessarily liked, but she'd done them anyway. It was about self-discipline.

:_Something my brother never seemed to have_: she thought to herself as she allowed herself a break and a sip from her canteen, figuring that if she practiced over-much right away, that, like any new regimen of excesize, she was in danger of overdoing it.

Her dear lackadaisical younger brother had always been possessed of incredible talent and shocking intelligence and intuition. Gifts which Meryl had, privately, _envied _him for a little. Schoolwork, on those rare occasions he bothered to do it, came easy to him. Where as Meryl was possesed of a very rigid thinking, and while not stupid, certainly didn't have his same talent for vewing the world from interesting angles and coming up with the most unique and surprising twists intuitively. She was able to turn out papers and assignments that, while always precisely what the teacher was looking for and never _technically _inaccurate, always seemed to come off as second-best when compared with his papers (despite the fact that he'd had gramatical and even spelling errors all over the place). When he could be bullied (by her) into doing his work they'd both gotten A papers (if he could find someone to read over it and edit it first) but his had always seemed... more _inspired_. Hers had been rigidly logical, well-structured, organized and ordely, but they had always seemed to lack _heart_. Marcus' papers were poetic, the prose in them flowing well and enjoyable to read, and always with an interesting twist or unexpected point to make. It had been a little frustrating.

He also picked up on physical activities faster than she did. She recalled with irritation the way he'd easily, within a weeks time, learned the basic excersizes of Tai-chi that it had taken her nearly a month of consistent drilling to make her body learn to do correctly. It wasn't in her nature to give up on something just because someone else did it better, but it had been a little discouraging to her. Her own younger brother was better at a skill she prided herself on in less time than it had taken her to learn it. He'd always had so much potential to make himself even better than he was and yet had never applied himself to improve. While Meryl who was in just about all ways average had to really push herself in order to stand out, Marcus had been able to stand out naturally without putting any effort into it. At least that was how it had always seemed to her.

She knew that he'd done it in part as a way to show her up. Meryl having come to his parents household later in their childhood (when teenage angsty emotions would have been running high _anyway_) was most certainly seen by Marcus, the beloved and indulged only child until then, as an interloper. An unwelcome interloper. Suffering with her father through the Lingering had granted her a certain amount of poise and an innate desire to succeed at anything put before her no matter how challenging, not to prove that she could do it or for a sense of accomplishment, but because it would make someone else proud of her, praise her, make much of her. In desperate need of attention and affection, Meryl had pushed herself to succeed even at the cost of making her new brother look bad because that was what her new parents wanted from her. It hadn't exactly made for good relations between the two of them, especially since Meryl had rather secretly reveled a bit when she knew that people were asking Marcus, "why can't you be more like Meryl" it meant that even if he _was _better than her at a lot of things, people actually approved of Meryl more than they did of him.

The two of them had had a very strong sense of sibling rivalry. Marcus with his easy-going charm and innate talent and intuition went against Meryl with her task-oriented, mathematically precise self-discipline.

Meryl stowed her canteen away and then stretched her arms again in preparation to resume her Channeling excersizes. She also firmly tucked away any thoughts about her brother and their ever-present sibling rivalry. Maybe this latest thing, bad as it was, would finally lay it to rest... Meryl was always right and Marcus should listen to her.

:_I warned him against the Bonding, but he went ahead and did it anyway_: she grumbled to herself, as she mentally prepared to draw off from the source stone she'd selected for her excersizes. :_And now i have to go and rescue him from the results of his stupidity. Maybe he'll listen to me from now on_.:

Somehow she doubted it though. Lazy, charming and utterly avantgarde he might be, but on very rare occasions Marcus could show a stubborn streak that rivaled Meryl's own. And generally it manifested itself whenever Meryl got onto him about the insensible way he did things. He never seemed to care much about anything, he spent all of his time loafing about, doing whatever he felt like and getting into trouble, thus forcing Meryl to follow along behind him cleaning up his messes and trying to get him out of trouble!

:_I'd better hope that Marcus and Vash never get together_: she thought with wry humor, recalling her very first impression after she realized that the bumbling moron they'd kept running into while looking for Vash the Stampede actually _was _Vash the Stampede... "why did it have to be him?" she'd demanded of the world at large.

:_They'd have a demonic tag-team of drive-me-crazy_!:


	35. Putting it Together

Vash sighed and looked out at the new spot of wasteland that the keystone had led them to. It had taken a day and a night and half of the next day of travel at top speeds but they'd found the next point. The Doc was currently in the "map room" (that was the navigators and communications chamber just off the cockpit) looking over the data about where the keystone points were in regards to one another because he thought that they might have some kind of relation. Milly was nearby in the shade and Jessica was still in her room sulking.

Vash looked at the rock face before him and wondered what the challenge was going to be this time. He could tell they were at the place by the tell-tale almost anticipatory buzz from Meryl's necklace. The thing had been acting a little strangely lately, buzzing on and off without any real pattern. Even now it fluctuated between a harder buzzing and a softer buzzing at unpredictable intervals.

He decided that he was going to have a nice long chat with her about these strange things that kept popping up as soon as he got her safe and away from his homicidal twin brother. Not that he thought it might do any good, he wasn't so sure Meryl herself was really aware of what was going on. That was another reason why he had held off for so long on telling her all about himself and his past, it wasn't that he thought she couldn't handle it (she taken everything else going on with a modicum of poise after all) it was that he hadn't wanted to scare her off. She seemed the sort who might become unsettled easily, but she'd surprised him again by pulling together and handling things, perhaps he should have more faith in her good sense.

"Well," he said to Milly, his voice heavy with resignation. "Let's get this party started."

He approached the rock face that the keystone was beaming at and when he got near it, it like all of the others, silvered over. Vash looked back at a mirror image of himself in the quicksilver surface for a moment before it shivered over and a new sort of puzzle appeared. This one had three grids, simple ones with one source node and only one channel spiralling out with other function nodes spread out along it. They were lined up side by side and beneath them was a single Source. A scrolling taskbar to one side instructed him to fill in the blank function nodes on each grid with their proper functions and then fit the grids together in the proper order to make best use of the Source energy while still completing the task that the grids were set for.

Vash shrugged and examined the grids and the circle of stock functions on the taskbars beside them. Each had at least one empty node to house a sub-grid (meaning he could tuck one grid inside the other to make it a funtion of a larger grid) and one source node (meaning that if he wanted to he could take all three grids and junction them to the Source separately). First he figured that he should figure out what the grids were for so he tapped on the function nodes of each and the node expanded into larger circles that showed the strange sigil-like symbol-language that worked a bit like the equations in maths, only less with numbers...

:_Though I guess it all comes down to numbers, in the end_: he mused absently to himself.

These were simple grids, nothing at all like the complex affairs that he had mastered the last time he'd tried to gain a piece of the keystone. One grid could be set to combine hydrogen and oxygen to make water, the second grid seemed be some kind of multiplier function, like it took one unspecified thing and made copies of it over and over again, and the third grid looked like it would make something like a large end-node stating 'when the function of something unspecified reaches this point it shall close off and cease to function.'

:_Well, this is easy_: Vash thought cheerfully tapping and dragging the function nodes into their proper slots on the blank grid and then tapping the source node of the first grid into the empty node he'd left to make it a function sub-grid of the second, then tapping and dragging the second Source node into the empty slot on the third. The grid lit up when he junctioned it to the source and the silvered-over former rock face opened up.

:_Wow_,: he thought, elated that he wasn't going to have to spend the better part of the day figuring out some complex affair with nodes, Sources, energy ratios and molecular recombination like the last two keystones he'd been sent after.

"You're done already?" Milly asked, surprised when she saw the cliff face open up moments after vash had begun working at it.

"Seems that way," he said.

Maybe things were finally going to start getting easier. Vash and Milly walked into the entrance of the cave which led to a long spiraling staircase leading downward into the darkness. Footsteps hurried in, echoing on the stone behind them as though someone were running after them. When they looked back, there were Doc and Jessica, the Doc with a variety of tools and recording equipment, and Jessica with lunch. Vash considered protesting; after all, they didn't know what was down there, but gave it up as pointless anyway, there hadn't been anything dangerous so far, unsettling certainly, but not dangerous. Besides, it might be better to have more than one pair of eyes looking at the situation, they might pick up or perceive something he had missed.

"You can come, just stick close," Vash said.

Jessica, immediately taking him at her word, latched onto his arm and glued herself to his side. Vash diplomatically decided against correcting her. They started down into the maw of the unknown beast.

The stairs were neat and even, made of some kind of polished stone, and they didn't need to bring thier own source of light because they way was lit at regular intervals by what looked to be some kind of crystal that emitted a steady bright blue-white light. The light crystals only lit up as they approached and when they passed them, the lights went back out again, so the small party of explorers constantly had thier way lit so they wouldn't stumble, but no-one had any idea how far down the stairs spiraled or how far they had come. The walls and ceiling were not rough-hewn or uneven either, infact they were quite smooth. Vash felt something nag at the edges of his memory, something to do with Meryl.

:_Why does this place feel so oddly **familiar**_?: he wondered to himself as the walked deeper and deeper into the earth.

The walls were almost glassy-smooth, and the steps perfectly even and regular. He knew he'd been in a place like it before but he just couldn't quite recall where. it was like there was a cotton haze settling over the particular memory he wanted to access and it was cushioned and obscured from all of his probes. Vash knew intrinsically that he hadn't put the block there himself, like the one that he'd placed around the horrible events that had happened in July City. There was something...

the strange buzzing coming from his necklace made the vague feeling crystallize into an intuitive leap into comprehension.

"I think i just figured something out," Vash muttered almost to himself.

"What's that Mister Vash?" Milly asked curiously. "Is it something to do with sempai?"

How in the hell did the girl just _know _these things? She didn't seem to have any sort of psychic gift that he could pick up, it was just that she always just seemed to _know_.

"Back when you sent us off for a day alone together," Vash said to Milly, ignoring the jealous scowl from Jessica. "Meryl and I went spelunking down in a cave near where you and the townspeople dug that new well. Your well-working boss hadn't perhaps mentioned anything unusual about the source of the water would he have?"

"Well," Milly said, pausing to think for a minute. "Now that you mention it, he _did _mention something about it. Lets see, what was it? Oh! I remember now! The senior worker was part of a survey team about twenty years ago or so, one of those that went around surveying the surface of the planet looking for likely places to open up a new settlement, y'know, places that had water or an easy way to make enough power to manufact it. He said that when his team was following that cavern system thier geologist had said that it was old and carved by water, but that all thier instruments said that the water was gone. They even did some exploring of some of the lower caverns hoping that some of the water might still have been trapped there and not absorbed, but he said that when they'd explored it, it had been dry as a bone. He was shocked to come back when the mayor wrote an angry letter to the survey company demanding to know why the team had said that there was no water when a kid could dig a hole in the sand and strike up a spring."

Milly smiled.

"The old man came back to take another look, and sure enough all the instruments read out that there was water water everywhere."

Vash frowned in thought. That grid he'd just handled...

Another memory nudged its way to the surface. He was sitting on the grass of a small farm courtesy of a pair of stubborn old people and their protective band of young men. Ostensibly he'd been settling in for a nap while the insurance girls 'kept him out of trouble," his real hand (complete with angel arm) had been reading the energy signature of the place that made it so green and lively on an inhospitable world, and had been unsurprised to note that yes indeed there was the energy of a plant interlacing the soil there. Vash had traced the signature for a little ways along the mineral vein it was apparently using to "spread out."

"I wonder," he muttered aloud, his mind working at a furious pace, putting facts, experiences, memories and conjecture together and breaking them apart to see what he came up with.

He'd been in a cave like this one before, but it hadn't been quite as neat. He'd also seen grids before, but at the time he hadn't realized what he'd been seeing. The cave that Milly had told them about, the one that he and Meryl had gone down to explore, that strange light-up-thingy on the arch that she'd unwisely started messing around with that had made her disappear...

Vash ignored the remembered clench of panic he'd felt squeezing his chest like a vice at the sight of Meryl there one moment and gone the next, right before his eyes.

She'd been putting functions in a node, but it had been like she'd been in some sort of trance. Then she'd disappeared, but instead of trying everything he could think of (including blasting the rock away with his angel arm) Vash had felt some kind of sleepy torpor close over him, cottoning his thoughts in a warm welcoming haze and draining all of his panic into sleepy lethargy. He knew now why the feeling of peace and tranquility that had seeped in around him and closed over his head like warm bathwater had felt so _familiar _that he hadn't even _thought _of resisting it... it was the same feeling he got whenever he touched thoughts with his siblings. Certainly it wasn't so clear when he dropped by thier bulbs for a visit, and it was all more removed and at a distance, but it was the _same _feeling. A feeling of welcome, and of peace, and a song calling to him to be one with it, that he'd never be alone again, never go unloved or feared. His sisters...

"And that's where it all began," he murmured.

Meryl had given him the necklace then. And when they were reunited...

Vash held back his blush at the thought of what had nearly happened between them when they'd been reunited inside that cave. Even now the thought of that feeling made parts of him flutter and ache with longing. It had been more than just a simple desire to kiss her, for moment it had felt like he could become _one _with her, like he could be united with her in ways most people could only ever _dream _about. He'd wanted that in that moment, he'd wanted belong to her and to claim her as his own. Dangerous thoughts for a man like him.

Vash set aside thoughts of her that came to plague him at unexpected moments and concentrated on other matters. Namely, he took a look at what the vague intuitive jumble of thoughts recollections and experiences had brought to him and mentally stood back and looked at it to see if perhaps he couldn't make sense of the whole this time.

He knew his sisters were reaching out into the world, spreading their power to terraform the planet out along mineral veins and slowly, slowly, slowly changing things bit by bit.

:_Well they'd probably **have **to move slowly_: he thought to himself as he and his companions paced ever downward along the smooth, perfectly regular stone staircase. :_I mean, they still have to power those cities, most of them. And the forgotten ones... I often get the feeling that they have thier own concerns_.:

Vash had not even the faintest earthly inkling of what those concerns might _be_, but it was difficult to understand the thoughts of his kin at the best of times. Raised by a human among other Human beings, Vash tended to think like and perceive the world like one, and the Plant Angels... _didn't_. It was like a butterfly trying to understand the thoughts of an ant colony. He just couldn't comprehend them.

:_Point the second_: he mentally ticked off on his fingers. :_We have the Gaea Device.:_

Well, according to some hints in some old top-secret garbage files he'd accidentally run across one day his Plant Angel kin had been developed to terraform a planet surface into a lush garden of eden. Vash didn't know how they had been supposed to have gone about it though, they'd been confined to their containment spheres in the cores of the SEEDs ships. Neither Rem nor the Captain had been inclined to discuss it with him, even _after _they'd started orbiting the surface of a world that showed promise with all of the charicteristics of a planet they might be able to terraform into the promised Eden.

Obviously, no thanks to Knives, the sisters had never been able to achieve their original designs on terraforming the world into a nice lovely garden for everyone to enjoy. No, instead they'd all crash landed here to eke out a miserable existence on a hot, dry, _horrid _little dust ball that just sucked all the moisture and life and hope right out of people. When Vash actually thought about how much it took to even just barely survive on this world (even with the help of the plant angels) it made him angry all over again.

:_Mind back on track_: he told himself.

The Gaea Device was apparently created to do what the original plans of the Plant Angels had been, terraformation, and by all appearences it had been created at the behest of those angels (if the claims of being charged with the task of creating the Gaea Device by Those Who Live Outside of Time by that guy in the holo had been in fact a truth and not just the crazed ravings of a madman wracked with guilt).

:_So presumedly the Gaea Device is complete_...:

Vash's thoughts trailed off as a another strange question occurred to him. If the Gaea Device was complete, then why weren't they using it?

:_They **probably **don't have enough power to do so_: he quickly supplied.

The Angels who ran the cities already had most of their power put into their demesnes, and the ones in forgotten ships crashed out in the middle of no-where were probably too small in number despite the fact that they had the extra power to themselves to fulfill the purpose.

"Great, so now we have a Gaea Device we can't use. That's useful," he muttered to himself.

:_Point the third, that keystone_.:

It was part of the Gaea Device, he was certain of it. But why was it scattered and so carefully hidden? Finding the very first piece of the keystone had been difficult, and gaining access to it even more so. He wondered how the old man had planned on getting Meryl to go along with his scheme to gather the pieces, after all, it had been to her, his daughter, that he had given the necklace that located the hiding places.

:_The obvious answer would be, because they don't want it falling into the wrong hands_: vash thought.

If someone gained control of the device somehow, perhaps by using the keystone, then that essentially meant that they held the entire world in their hands.

:_And my brother wants it_.:

That wasn't good. It was probably best that Knives wasn't the one gathering the pieces together. But if Vash was able to solve the puzzles that enabled him to gather the pieces, then so would Knives be.

:_But Knives doesn't have this_: he thought fingering the strange crystal pendant that Meryl had given him for safe-keeping, the pendant that reacted with the keystone to make it act as a compass pointing toward the next peice of the puzzle. Which brought him to

:_How does **Meryl **fit into all of this_?:

He knew she did somehow, even if she didn't seem to be aware of it. She was the most prosaic and utterly ordinary woman he knew, but that didn't mean that forces couldn't be moving around her, manipulating her.

Manipulating them both?

Vash frowned a bit at that. Given his continuing (as well as his most recent) experiences with being manipulated by his brother Knives and that thrice-damned Legato (may he be burning in his own personal hell right now... of course, Vash halfway thought he'd probably be taking it over on behalf of his master so Knives would have a nice hellish throne to ascend to when Vash finally_ lost it_ and sent him there) he wasn't certain he liked the thought of being a piece on someone elses chessboard, worse on being an unknown peice on a board he hadn't been entirely _aware _of until then.

:_I've never known any of the Plant Angels, besides Knives, to ever have anything but benign and benevolent thoughts_: Vash protested inwardly.

Whatever it was they were planning he was sure that it wouldn't be a _bad _thing.

:_But Knives is a Plant Angel too, and look at him_.:

Vash shelved that one, because it would open up a whole large can of the _bitter juice_. Knives and all his plots and transgressions were something best avoided for now if Vash wanted to think clearly. Again he felt that slight stirring within him as his thoughts skirted the edge of bitterness surrounding the fact that Knives wasn't taking Vash's victory very gracefully at all, and point blank refused to play nice. And he'd kidnapped Meryl away from him.

:_So, how does Meryl fit into all of this_?: Vash brought his thoughts back to the matter at hand.

Her father had created the Device, apparently without her knowledge. He'd given her a stone that, when placed in the presence of a piece of the keystone, could light the way to the resting place of the next piece. The pieces of the keystone were all hidden away sealed behind impregnable barriers locked with puzzles that an ordinary person couldn't possibly hope to solve. That suggested that the makers of the Gaea Device did not expect an ordinary person to be the one to solve it.

:_And here's the kicker_: he thought. :_How does Meryl, out of all the people in the world, end up being the one to be assigned to keep me under twenty-four hour surveilance_?:

Wait a minute.

"Milly?" Mash asked into the silence of the stairway. (How much farther down were they going anyway?)

"Yes Mister Vash?" Milly asked immediately.

"Who's Meryl's boss?"

"Mister James T. Bernardelli the Third, of the Bernardelli Insurance Society," Milly answered promptly.

"Uh-huh. And does Mister James T. Bernardelli the Third ever come out of his nice comfy office to run assignments like the rest of you?"

"Only once a year," Milly said. "He has to run the inspection of December City's plant facility. He's the only one who can you know, it's too important a job for anyone but the chief."

"And do you know if he ever inspects the plant there?"

"Yes, he has to look over every part of the facility to make sure that it's up to code so that he can keep collecting pay on thier insurance without having to worry that he would have to pay money in case of an accident on a facility that had been breaking down, you see."

Vash nodded to himself. So that was it.

"Thank-you," he said, and turned his mental attention inward.

:_Well, he definately comes under regular influence from one of the Sisters_: Vash thought.

Vash knew the stories as well as anyone; of Plant Engineers who had an impeccable record of service to thier plants living two, sometimes three, times longer than an average persons lifespan.

:_It's not outside the realm of possibility that she may have been influencing him_.:

After all, why else would an otherwise sane and reasonable individual send two young women out onto the rough and wild frontier to chase down what "everyone knows" is a murdering outlaw with no conscience or morals to speak of?

:_If one of the Sisterhood planted the idea in his mind to send her out to track me down, it actually makes sense... sort of_: he thought.

Suddenly, a small but infinitely _amusing _mental image popped into his head and Vash, surprised by the idea burst out laughting before he could stop himself.

"What's so funny?" Doc asked curiously.

Vash got a mental picture of Meryl Stryfe riding along on her tomas the first time he'd ever met her, only with a big red bow on her head, like the kind used to wrap presents with, and a tag hanging down with the words **_To: Vash. From: His loving Sisters_**. They'd in essence apparently just _gift wrapped_ her for him and sent her out to him.

"It's nothing," he denied.

Hanged if he was ever going to let _that _one get back to Meryl... and Milly would tell her too, those insurance girls shared everything.


	36. Down in the Underground

"Finally!" Jessica exclaimed. "I was wondering if we were expected to journey down to the center of the earth!"

In a rounded out cavern in the bottom of the chamber the walls were blank and utterly bare of any sort of doorway or opening at all, there was only a strange inset on three sides of the circle in a perfect triangle with a spherical niche carved out of them and a strange design on the smooth stone floor, glowing softly with a mixing of green, blue and pale purple light. It was a picture of a large three-axis grid with a number of intersecting nodes. No, when Vash looked at it more carefully, it was three axis grids layered _one atop the other_, green then blue then violet. It looked almost labyrinthine from his point of view above it. The center of the grid where the Source node usually was, was glowing a soft white light. Jessica curiously scuffed at it with the toe of her boot to see if it would rub off. Vash jerked her back behind him at the proceeding flash of light.

He froze for a long moment, every sense and reaction in his body poised to fight and defend, but nothing more exciting happened than a white beam of light shooting up into the darkness was surrounded by three glowing balls of light, one blue, one green and one purple hovering a shoulder height to Jessica. They didn't do anything more harmful than hover there for a moment so after a small time, the ever-inquisitive Doc approached it with some of his sensory devices to see if he couldn't get anything to read or examine about them. Vash too, out of curiosity, and to protect his old friend, approached the lights.

"Hm..." Milly said, also approaching.

Before Vash could cation her to be careful, Milly had already reached out and taken one of the balls of light into her hand, plucking it from out of the air. The green colored one, perhaps because green seemed to be her favorite color.

"It feels warm," was all she said.

Vash breathed a sigh of relief and wondered if he should scold her for taking unneccessary risks. He was still debating when she turned toward the wall and walked over to one of the little insets in it with the tiny carved-out shere-shaped niches and pushed the light-sphere in. There was a soft pulsing glow in the niche for a moment then a strange little picture made of a soft smoke-like glowing light wrote itself in the air before the sphere and hovered there for a moment then pulsed again and was gone.

A half a heartbeat later the sign on the floor with its muted glow suddenly lit up a brilliant green and the circle that surrounded the layered grid lit up and then disappeared taking a section of the until-now solid floor with it. This left behind a platform hovering by itself in the air.

Jessica, not at all afraid hoped the short distance onto it before anyone could think to caution her the platform stayed steady as a rock. Shrugging, the Doc, Milly and Vash followed suit. Vash started a little when the platform began to glide downwards like an elevator. A few moments later of staring at bare smooth rock in the strange green luminescence provided by the now brightly glowing sigil on the floor the lift slowed to a gentle stop opening out on another chamber that was perfectly circular with a glyph on the floor.

The glyph on the floor was much simpler than the one from the chamber above, having only one three-axis grid instead of a number of grids with three axises layered on top of one another. The circular chamber had three perfectly round archways leading to tunnels branching off from it. None of the further corridors were lit but at the entrance of each archway was a smokey glyph made of light hanging like a curtain in space between the round chamber and the tunnels beyond. When Vash approached the glyphs for a closer look he found that the pale, glowing sigils in the air were in fact grids. Blank ones.

Vash looked down at the round sigil elevator which had brought them to this new round chamber beneath it then quietly merged with the stone floor. The central node glowed green, but all of the other nodes spiraling off into the axis spreading out from it were a dead grey.

"Hn. You are here," the Doc noted dryly.

"Seems that way," Vash agreed.

He examined the grid glowing on the floor carefully. Figuring that it had worked so far already, Vash touched the glowing node on the floor with the toe of his boot and a wide, spreading circular beam of light shot out of it. He jumped back by reflex but nothing more harmful that that appeared. Withing the beam of light, out of the ground appeared three small glowing balls of soft green light light, floating lazily in the air at about shoulder height. Vash approached the orbs and noted that instead of being simple spheres with a glowing nimbus of light at its heart and a glassy shield around it, these spheres were made of long strings of glyphs and symbols wrapped around themselves like a ball of yarn.

"Okay, I get it," he muttered. "Sort of."

"Looks like another sort of puzzle," Doc said cheerfully.

Of course he could be cheerful, he didn't have his short girls life hanging in the balance of getting this right so he could get that stupid keystone.

Vash plucked one of the glyph spheres from the air and walked over to the nearest glowing sphere hanging in the air. Curious, he tested the barrier first, wondering if there wasn't a way he could just walk through it. It wasn't a palpable sensation but when his hand hit where the barrier was it just wouldn't go any further. Shrugging, Vash pushed the orb into the center. The glyph pulsed once, the orb dissipating in his hand as the light from it spread out like a ripple onto the glyph. The Glyph itself disappeared but spiraling out from it flying up and around his head were five smaller spheres of light, the exact number of nodes in the blank grid for that section. After the barrier disappeared, the floor of the tunnel leading away from the circular central chamber lit up with a soft pale green light.

Okay, he got it. Walk along the tunnel, fill the nodes and solve. Right. Vash tried not to be unsettled by the strange floating crown of green spheres that seemed to have attached itself to him. No, this wasn't strange at all.

"Okay, let's go," was all he said.

Wordlessly the group followed into the tunnel after him. it curved round soothly as all the channels on a proper grid would and after a few minutes Vash came to a round little spot with a stone pedestal sticking up out of the floor of the cave, little shereical niche like a half-moon waiting for him.

"Which one do you pick, mister Vash?" Milly asked.

Good question, there was more than one sphere hovering about his head and all of them had incomprehensible glyphs in them. Well, that wasn't entirely true, the glyphs were familiar to him, it was the same symbol language used to create function nodes on the grid. The identifier sigil for the node hovered in the heart of the spheres with strands of the functions written out in strings of circles like rings of ice-crystals orbiting a planet. And he thought he recognized the grid from the ones he'd filled out at the entrance. Well in that case this shouldn't be too hard. Vash collected the sphere featuring the identifier sigil he remembered using for this spot in the grid when he'd solved it outside and placed it in the pedestal. The tunnel which had been unlit after the pedestal lit with more of the soft green light and the part continued onward to the next node.

It was fairly boring, there was nothing to look at and it was quiet and just a little eerie looking with the green light and all. Doc was immersed in his reading so Jessica and Milly struck up a conversation and Vash listened with half an ear.

"So what's she like?" Jessica asked.

"You mean sempai?" Milly replied. "Oh she's really great! my little big brother calls her a stick in the mud, but he always _was _a bit wild. Meryl's not a stick in the mud at all. When that guy was dragging me away Meryl came after me and jumped on that mans back hitting and clawing and made him let me go..." Milly trailed off awkwardly and finished.

"But that just meant that she got taken instead of me."

"Oh," said Jessica awkwardly. "So you've been traveling together for a while then, you two and Vash?"

Vash mentally quirked an eyebrow. She was _fully _fishing for information.

"About three years off and on," Milly said candidly.

Vash knew what she meant by off and on though. Meryl and Milly had traveled with him for a year and a few months before the incident at Augusta, and there had been a period of about a year, maybe a little less, where he'd apparently dropped off teh face of the planet. He'd been hiding with Lina and grandma Sheryl at their house near Carcasses. After they'd been reunited on the sand steamer, they'd been traveling together ever since, but with the rest of the Guns and the discovery of the empty towns and... Legato, it hadn't _seemed _very long, however now that Vash thought about it, another year had almost flown by without him noticing.

To be honest, Vash tried his best not to notice time as it passed him... if he did and he thought about the passage of time in a human way; one year to the next, celebrating significant dates, he would surely notice how much time there was. So he drifted, partly as a way to keep from being found and partly as a way to not notice that the people around him were getting older and older as time went by. If he had no real permanent attachments then that meant he didn't have to watch them fade like flowers while he lived on, unchanged and unchanging except for a new scar written on his body here or there. He'd tried not to let himself dwell on how lonely that made him feel.

"Wow that's a long time," Jessica said. "When I was a girl he used to come and visit the ship often and play with us kids there, but he never stayed for very long."

"Oh, that's nice," Milly said, probably having nothing else to say to that.

"Where's that man who was here the last time? He helped save my life."

"What man?" Milly asked, requesting clarification.

"Last time Vash came to New Sky City he brought along a guest," Jessica explained. "He was about as tall as Vash with dark hair and a huge cross he carried around on his back. Most of the others didn't want him there because they were afraid he'd bring violence with him to contaminate the peaceful settlement, but really, it was already there we just didn't know it. Vash's friend helped us find the bad puppet-man who'd snuck on board and kidnapped me."

"Oh!" Milly exclaimed, understanding at last whom Jessica was referring to.

"That's um, that was Mister Wolfwood..." she trailed off, smiling brightly. ?"He's uh... he's not..."

"Oh, I see. I'm sorry," Jessica said. "He and Vash certainly seemed to get along well."

"They did, didn't they?" Milly said cheerfully.

To Vash's ears the cheer rang just a bit hollow, but he commended her for trying.

"Not like him and Brad anyway, of course, Brad always _did _have a chip on his shoulder about Vash..." Jessica trailed off again.

:_I'd have a chip on my shoulder too, if the girl I was in love with liked another guy who was never even there with her for years at a stretch_,: Vash thought sparing a pitying thought for the poor departed man.

Brad, Wolfwood... who knew how many others, all notches on a long running tally Vash kept on the people his brother had killed just to get to _him _going all the way back to Rem. Vash was absolutely detirmined that Meryl's name was not going to be added to the list. He quickened his pace a little, deciding to listen to the impatient little voice in the back of his head that said hurry, hurry, hurry. Hurry or Meryl would get hurt, hurry or Meryl might die.

"He's been awful quiet lately," Jessica whispered to Milly, assuming that Vash couldn't hear them just fine.

"Mister Vash is just worried about Sempai," Milly murmured back. "I wonder if she went nuts on him or not."

"Went nuts? Is she crazy?" Jessica asked, and it sounded like there was a note of hope in her voice.

"Only in the usual way that people always go crazy," Milly replied.

Vash heart leapt up a little at this revelation that he was probably not supposed to have overheard. By that point in time Vash had gotten adept at interpreting Milly-speak, and if he was interpreting correctly the "usual way that people went crazy" was _love_. Did that mean that Meryl...?

Vash immediately reigned himself in before he could get his hopes up too far. It was obvious by the lengths she went to help him that she felt something for him beyond a working-woman fulfilling her duties, but love? How could she _possibly _love a man who always seemed to drag her along with him into trouble?

:_And come to that how can we possibly have a future together_?: Vash thought, his shoulders slumping downward.

On the way out to fight his brother, his heart, while heavy with the recent events that still weighed on him, had been light with the thought that once he had faced the demon that plagued him, he might possibly have a future of his _own _choosing afterward! He could have those things that he'd always wanted but had feared to grasp for himself, he could have that quiet, peaceful little house, and the wife and the kids running around the yard. It might not last forever, but it would be something to hold him in the long, dark time of lonliness afterward.

:_You just got selfish_,: he recriminated himself. :_And now look what happened_.:

Meryl taken by his brother and being treated who knew how well or how badly... her finger cut off. If she'd liked him even a little bit before, she probably didn't now. He wouldn't blame her. For her own sake he hoped she decided to cut and run while she was still mostly in one peice. Once he had her safe away from his brother he'd send her back home.

:_But what if she won't go_?: a part of him argued and Vash chose to ignore the fact that the voice in his mind was blatantly hopeful that she wouldn't leave him.

If she wouldn't go on her own, he'd just have to find a way to make her. These were dangerous sands that he walked. He didn't want her hurt any more than she already was.

:_She'd be in danger anyway_,: the little voice in his head insisted.

After all, Knives knew about her now (if he didn't before) and worse still, he knew that he could use her to make Vash do things that he wouldn't ordinarily do.

Vash sighed heavily. It was quite a conundrum; was Meryl safer as far away from him as he could get her, or would she be safer with him where he could protect her from the wrath of his brother? Both options had their dangers, if she was far away from him Vash would be counting on the fact that she was out of sight meaning that she would be out of mind as well, and with the far-reaching memory his brother possessed that was far from a guarantee. But the other option was as bad in its own way, if she stayed by his side, she'd be dragged in too, the very same problem that he'd warned her away from before the events at Augusta.

"What's the matter?" Doc asked glancing up with his recording device.

So Vash told him, ending with

"So what do you think? Should I make her leave or let her stay?"

At which the Doc snorted.

"It's been my experience that the choice isn't really yours to make. Cats and women will do as they please. And that goes double for the stubborn, independent sort. No boy, best you talk it over with the lady other wise you'll probably find yourself in entirely new and difficult kinds of trouble."

"What's that mean?" asked Vash.

"A woman like that won't take kindly to having her choices made for her, even if the events are really beyond anything she can understand or control."

"Wouldn't she be happy, I mean I'm only trying to protect her..." Vash mumbled.

"Does she seem the sort who'd go looking for protection?" the Doc countered.

Vash thought about it for a minute. Granted she was an ordinary enough, office-girl sort of woman, (most of the time) but she didn't seem to have any difficulties with tossing aside that city-girl part of her to go gallivanting off into the wild, untamed outlands to chase down outlaws and stop steamer raids either. No when he thought about it, Meryl Stryfe, instead of screaming or running away from danger the way an ordinary girl might went running straight _into _danger all of the time.

He recalled very well their first ever encounter with each other, the two insurance girls had managed to get away (along with him) from that weirdo with the mohawk and that Loose Ruth fellow and were riding to warn the town about the danger of Vash the Stampede when she'd reigned the beast around, given him ten double-dollars to go and warn the town then rode straight back into danger. "It's part of the job, it's what we do," she told him simply in a voice filled with determination. And there were other examples of her not being afraid to face things that he would happily have run away from if she felt it was the right thing to do. Lots of examples.

"No she doesn't," Vash was forced to concede.

A big strong man to protect her seemed to be the _last _thing that one Meryl Stryfe was looking for.

:_Is she only with me because she feels **sorry **for me_?: Vash wondered momentarily, dismayed the thought.

In all the time they'd traveled together she'd seen all the troubles that his life and fame brought to him. heck she'd seen what his body looked like (Vash was still shocked that she hadn't been the one screaming instead of him) it wasn't unreasonable to think she might pity him. How deep did that pity go? vash felt depression settle in.

:_After all, what do I bring to the relationship_?: he thought, besides a whole mess of trouble that was.

He didn't have a job or any means to support them, Meryl did all of the work, what could he possibly offer her that would make it worth her time to stay? Nothing. And on top of his having nothing to offer her, he had less than nothing because his brother rode his back like his own personal demon and was detirmined to make not only Vash miserable but to ruin the lives of anyone who'd ever met him.

"I'm not saying you shouldn't perhaps think of a way to try to keep your lady friend out of harms way," Doc continued, oblivious to the depressing turn that Vash's thought had taken.

"Just don't be surprised when she bites your head off for trying," the Doc finished. "She sounds like a temperamental creature."

"Oh she is," Vash said fervently, recalling the numerous times that her temperament had been unleashed upon _him_.

If the thruth be known howerver, he'd sort of enjoyed himself a little bit. She was stunning when she was angry and whatever she felt, she felt completely. He'd also noticed that trying to distract her or placate her or change the subject once she'd taken the bit between her teeth on something was an excersize in futility. She would not be swayed would not be placated would not be turned aside from her purpose once she had decided on it.

His thoughts and maunderings had taken the party, stopping along at even intervals to place one of the glowing green orbs floating about his head like so many planets orbiting the sun into a pedestal int eh path and lighting thier way to the next section, back to the original three-way intersection that they had caught the elevator down to. Vash plucked another sphere from the beam of light and pushed it onto the barrier of another passage way, and just as with the first, the sigil on the barrier disappeared and the original sphere was divided into a halo of five glyph spheres circling about his head. Vash tried not to sigh with annoyance as he and the rest of the party trudged down the second twisting pathway.

It would be a while in the solving, but Vash was determined that he would get it done. Meryls life depended on it, and he wouldn't fail her again.

* * *

The up-jutting basalt craggy-rock formation poked sharply at the sky, like a church steeple and it was a more identifiable landmark than Meryl would have wished, but the main body of teh rock formation was just what tehy were looking for. A tumble of rocks protected on the leeward side of the wind and carved out by nature into a hollow ledge, they could shelter comfortably in it and wait for the storm that was coming to pass.

"And with any luck," Meryl thought out loud. "The storm will utterly cover our tracks. It should definitely kick up enough sand for that."

"Do you think we'll be safe in here?" Remembrance asked in trepidation, clearly eying the shallow shelter offered by the hollow in the rock face nervously. If the mixed sand and air on the wind came from the wrong direction there was no-way it would offer enough protection to keep them from breathing sand, even a newbie could see that for herself.

"Under ordinary circumstances, no," Meryl replied bluntly. "But..."

she held her hands before her and a smoke-grey grid wove itself into the air before her.

"I think that with the power these stones give me I should be able to do something that'll increase our odds of survival."

She'd been practicing enough for the last two days at it, both with the sight and with the pulling power into her channels, grounding and centering it then releasing it back into the stone, it was about time she tested the fruits of her self-imposed training. The least all that work could do was do them some good, and be _useful_.

Meryl closed her eyes and visualized her goals clearly, what was she wanting to accomplish, and what was the best way to go about it? She wanted a good, tight, secure shelter from the storm, one that wasn't immediately noticeable as such. She looked at the ground of the tumble of rocks before her consideringly. It would be easier to use what was already there than it would be to make new, so...

:_If I just reshape the rock_...: she thought, almost of their own accord the smokey drifting, purposeless, peweter-grey channels hanging in between her meridians wove themselves into a grid. The symbols for substance and the formula for the rock and the place values for the area before her wrote themselves in symbolic language in the opening nodes of the grid.

:_It would be better if it were underground, at least partially_,: she decided.

The grid functions changed themselves accordingly.

:_The rocks should also form to cover the entire area and not just part of it_.: A large sub-grid with secondary and tertiary functions wrote itself and tucked into the following node.

:_And the cracks and crannies on the inside of the rock overhead were sealed up so the sand and wind can't get in_.:

The grid functions for reshaping the rock added a modifying sub-grid.

:_And the entrance were able to be sealed up, but opened easily, perhaps on a hidden pivot_.:

Another sub-grid.

She caught a whiff of her scent, which after four days of traveling in the burning heat of The Forge was... really something. Meryl immediately decided that while she was reshaping rock and making someplace safe to hole up in, creating a stone hollow and some water for a bath wasn't a luxury... it was a _necessity_! They were going to have to sleep near each other in an enclosed space, if they did it after not having bathed in three days the _smell _would kill them all.

:_Water and some way to heat it_,: another sub-grid.

Meryl looked at the large, multi-layered grid hanging in the air before and was momentarily daunted by it. She wasn't certain exactly how she had known to write it, she knew that all of that couldn't just be explained away as repressed memories or somesuch, she knew deep down without knowing _how _she knew that there was something else going on. The thought made her more than a little nervous.

:_Nothing for it_,: she thought with wary resignation.

:_I have to use what I have, no matter how I came to have it_.:

For once in her life she had no choice but to just go with what she could do her best and hope that in the end it was all going to make some kind of sense.

Having the grid written out before her, Meryl let it hang there for a moment and then set it aside to use after she had pulled power from the stone and made it into a Source. She closed her eyes, mentally preparing herself.

"I've never done what I'm about to do," Meryl said solemnly. "The grids I used before used power from my own Source and not from that hard, stinging lightning-power in the stones. And secondly, judging by the values required in the grid, i've never pulled as much power as i'm going to need to use from a Source before."

"Can you do it?" Remembrance asked, seroiusly.

"I'm going to have to," Meryl replied.

:_No more _stalling.:

The Source stone she'd chosen hovered before her, glowing a soft iridescent white. Meryl took a deep breath in and let it out, trying to mentally focus herself enough to endure what she knew was probably going to be something of a painful ordeal for her. That power stung. A lot of it _really _hurt. Despite all of ther practicing over the last two days she hadn't taken in as much as she was about to.

Meryl sunk her weight and made the pulling motion of reeling silk energy, bring her hands around in a smooth flowing motion to cup the air, top and bottom, before her her belly. A soft glowing nimbus of power, like a cloudy little star with swaying tendrils of power looping and weaving aimlessly in and out of it grew there between her hands. Meryl slowly started to expand the area between her hands, pulling power gradually from the stone and channeling it into the little Source she had started between her hands.

The Source, shielded and centered between her hands grew steadily, as did the level of discomfort that came from pulling power from the stone. At first it started out as barely an itch, the mildest sensation of pain one could feel, then it graduated slowly to a sting, then to a greater string and then to a burn, like whiskey along her ephemeral senses. Then it lost its warming sensation and became a painful burn, like touching an ember. The burn branded itself along her channels feeling like liquid lightning flowing through her. It was painful, more painful than anything she had ever endured before but it was also somehow strangely exhilarating! The power rode through her like a live wire with the force of an erupting volcano behind it, but there was a small part of her that wasn't curled up around herself screaming in agony that delighted in the feeling of controlling so much sheer _power_.

The Source crystal glowed from a pure iridescent white that had all of the colors of the spectrum within it to a soft violet down into indigo then onto a blue-white light like she had seen in teh incident at Augusta. And still she hung on, pulling her hands apart to suck more of the power from the Source stone into her channels and feeding it through to create the glowing nimbus of Souce cupped behind a shield between her hands. She gritted her teeth as the color changed from blue to blue-green, to green. She gritted her teeth to keep from sobbing in pain as the power that rode her grew in power and pain. Green to golden yellow, yellow on up to ruddy orange then to vemillion red, the color of the sky as the world fell down. Meryl screamed as the scarlet power burned through her, but grasped the lightning with a will and determination that would not be broken, bent or turned aside from her purpose. She was Meryl Stryfe dammit! And she was stronger than this.

Finally, when she swore she could take no more and that the force and pain of the power flowing through her would make her fly apart at the molecules the stone she was pulling power from dimmed and went a dead grey-black. Holding on by grit and determination alone now, Meryl grounded, centered and shielded the Souce again by habit and the dint of drill and careful repetition then junctioned the power into her grid. There was a rippling flash along the grid as the power burst into it like a crescendo-ing sand-slide, but she knew no more after that.

* * *

**When I posted the first time I just clicked on the post button figuring that you'd all want it sooner rather than perfect... I guess not. I almost always go through and do a last minute edit to clean up all the spelling and grammatical errors**** before I post a new chapter but i didn't have time this session. Keep in mind that I have one or two other stories I'm also editing and posting as well as this one and I do them all in one session... that about ten to twelve thousand words on average. If anyone wants to volunteer to beta and take some of the work load off, that's be great! Anyone? Well anyway, sorry about all the "teh" (I went back and counted at least ten of them, geeze, I must've written this one late at night) here, I fixed it. **

**BTW I hope I'm not the only one that wants to sing "down in the underground..." (Yeah, Labyrinth is my all-time favorite movie). Oddly enough, the underground bit was actually inspired by Final Fantasy 10 though, all those damned Cloister of Trials challenges you have to figure out.  
**


	37. Hour of the Wolf

**I went back and did the revising and editing that I had neither time nor inclination for last time so if anyone wants to go back and read it without being plagues with "teh" feel free. Just please keep in mind, this isn't the only story I post and I do have a (sadly) busy life outside the posting thing so I don't always have time for fifteen to twenty thousand words of edit. If anyone wants to volunteer to take some of the work load... anyway, sorry it's late this week, I've had a hectic week and people wouldn't leave me alone long enough for my final edit and polish all week, so I had to put it off.

* * *

**

The purple light shining up at him from the floor was even creepier in its own way than the green had been. The blue he could handle, it was somewhat familiar to him, but the purple was in no-way even a _little _bit familiar. He ignored all of that in favor of solving the puzzle placed before him.

Walk down the lighted way to the next pedestal, insert the correct glyph shere and continue on until he reached the end. A pad underneath the pedestal automatically teleported him and his friends back to the center room with the three axes. he'd broken down a while ago and grudgingly sat down for lunch though he hadn't wanted to spend the time on it. Even Milly was starting to get a little tired, even though she wasn't solving the puzzles, she was still doing the leg-work for them and all of the walking was taking its toll.

Jessica had given up on trying to make small talk with him after a while and Doc was engrossed in his recording devices. Milly, trooper that she was, seemed to be taking it all in stride. They were almost done with this section of passage, Vash had only three little spheres circling about his head and by the distance he'd traveled between each pedestal previously, it shouldn't be a whole lot longer.

Then he would only have two more passages to go.

"What time is it?" Jessica asked Milly pleadingly. The taller Insurance Girl looked at her wrist watch and announced

"Ten at night."

Vash didn't flick an eyebrow, even though he was a little surprised, they'd been at this _all day_. It was easy to loose track of time down in the caverns under the ground, with only the steady light of the tunnels to light your way. Vash had a pretty good internal timekeeper, but with all of the other things on his mind he didn't really _care _what time it was exactly, the only thing that mattered to him was getting it done as soon as possible.

* * *

The black winds of the midnight sand-wind did much more than moan or murmur in between the jagged rocks and precipices of the basalt rocks. It didn't even howl... no, it was a full blown scream, like the cry of a madwoman screeching and shrieking her rage out into the world. Blast wind scoured over the rocks, solving the slight mystery of exactly how some of those jagged formations had gotten such a strangely smooth-polished surface in some places. Legato's new thralls had been forced to take shelter in the traveling vessel that Legato himself had been granted use of by the Master. It was inconvenient, but he allowed it because thralls were no good to him dead because then he'd have to do all of the searching himself (and the Master would have fewer people to use in his plot). The seeming-thin walls of the vessel shook and shuddered with each new blast of wind, but if the outside could take the heat and friction of entry into planetary orbit then a little sandstorm was nothing to it. The storm was unnerving his thralls though, he could tell by the nervous glances around every time the wind buffeted the vessel and made it shudder. That was fine, it was easier to keep them in line that way, easier to control a mind distracted by fear, easier when he was the only one to seek shelter with.

The only downside of the situation was that he was no closer to finding his master's missing acquisitions while they waited out the storm. It hardly mattered though, he doubted that those three females were going anywhere right then anyway, if they were able to _survive _the storm at all.

The most recent acquisition, Master's Brother's female, the shorter of the two women who followed him around, was interesting to him. He'd seen her from far away on a few occasions that he'd had contact with Master's Brother, always calm, always collected, even on that day when he'd held her in his thrall. It interested him that she'd started to _resist _him. He'd had his own power wrapped around the closed box that was her mind, holding it frimly in his grip along with all of the others, so he hadn't paid muct attention to it at first... but when he felt her start to pull away. That was when he came to notice that the "texture" of the box that was her mind was different from the people around her. The mind of an ordinary person, such as Meryl Stryfe was supposed to be, felt much like a loose, jumbled pile of yarn, thoughts and whispers sticking out willy nilly, but that woman's mind... her mind was _neat_, like a precisely wound clock. He'd been hesitant to probe it too deeply, afraid that his metaphysical fingers would get pinched in the gears.

It was a mystery. An ordinary woman, like her partner, would have been completely helpless but that woman had had some kind of protection in place around her mind. It had been a thin, flexible shell, like the sacking around an embryo, events had already went according to his masters plans and Legato had _had _to stick to the script. Legato had been able to take control of her limbs not by ordinary telepathic mind control as he'd excersisced with everyone else, but by creating telekinetic bonds around her body. There had been something exquisitely interesting about her, a feeling he recognized now as being similar to the Master's latest aqqusition, the mostly-human creature that Master would use to gain control of the great machine. They had thought that Resonants only bred to the male, but here was a possible female!

The Master could on occasion by generous, especially when he intended to dispose of the human later on, sometimes he would give a few of them to Legato first to work out a new technique or refine an old one on. It was always a shame when one of them broke since that meant that Legato had to wait until an new one might be acquired, but there were always more, especially after Master had ordered that the Southern Cornelia region should be cleared of all human filth and the beasts put into cages for later use. It would be a small matter for Master to give the woman over into Legato's keeping while the Master's Brother went about the quest that Master had set him. Granted, Legato might not get as much time to enjoy working on her as he would like (the Master had a number of tasks for him after all) but it would certainly help him while away those hours in between assignments, to have some new project to work on.

It went without saying that he hoped this new project might benefit his master. Master Knives, though he was in all ways a perfect and superior being to a mere human, seemed to be having difficulties in persuading the Resonant around to his point of view. Perhaps it was that the creature was not entirely human anymore, perhaps it was that the thing had had some contact with a member of the masters superior species, but whatever the reason... while the thing might cry out, weeping and begging for mercy, it would not do what the master ordered it to do, which was to turn its Channels over to him. Legato wondered if there might be something stopping it. In all other ways the creature was submissive, but with regards to its channels, it was like there was some force outside of its will _protecting _it. The master was most displeased. Perhaps Legato might find something else to amuse the Master with.

_Perhaps the resonant woman, if indeed she is a resonant, will amuse him. If nothing else, there is the possibility of breeding more of her kind from her eggs. _

More Resonants, properly raised and trained to obedience to Master would certainly be a worthwhile project for the future. Meryl Stryfe was unlikely to cooperate with the idea but that would also be an interesting project, over the years bringing her sort to the proper way of thinking had become something of a specialty of his.

The Master had no interest in the women of the lower species, naturally... the mere thought of copulating with one quite rightly disgusted him. However, he did seem to enjoy watching them in pain, and he seemed to have a particular type that he favored. The kind the master liked to watch be brought to heel _best _were males of the tall brawny type, broad of shoulder with a certain ape-ish cast to their features and it was important that they have brown hair.

The women were creatures that he enjoyed toying with on _another _level... the men were a quick fix, straight physical injuries and various methods of physical harm, but the women... Master liked to _own _them, he liked to lock them up in bare white rooms by themselves and watch them as they called out for someone to help them or feed them and demand to know where they were and who had taken them. He denied them food and water and sleep. After a sufficient amount of time had passed, master liked to test them, ask them questions, impossible questions until they wept with fear and exhaustion. He _especially _liked the ones who fought back, who stood up to him and stood their ground with words; well-argued, logical, heartfelt, defiant. He liked those ones the best. He liked to watch the hope die in their eyes as they realized that help was not going to come for them and they would die there alone. He liked to watch as gradually their lives to flickered and faded to nothing.

It would be well to offer the master the shorter of the Master's Brothers pets as an amusement to Master Knive to while away the hours while they waited for Vash to finish his task and return to his brother's side. By Legato's observances, she seemed stubborn enough and of the right kind of character to provide the Master with a most satisfying amusement for quite some time. She even seemed to be about the same physical _type _he enjoyed the best; dark hair, a certain cast to her features. Not only would she amuse the master, but in breaking her delicately from the inside and handing her back to Vash, whole in body but shattered in spirit, he would be dealing a greivous blow to the masters brother! A fitting chastisement for not coming to realize the rightness of the Masters plans. After all, Master had only promised his brother that he would not _harm _the creature, he'd said nothing of her mental state when Vash finally got her back. Eternal suffering to Vash the Stampede. Legato could lay the ground work for the Master's later amusement, and explore the mystery of how she was protected from mental attack all in one swoop. Elegant.

Again, Legato felt another stirring in the back of his mind, like something in him protested violently, but it was gone before he could pin it down. The telepath made a mental note to go over his host body's mental wards more carefully when he had time. It wouldn't do for any of his host's idiotic morals to be lingering about when Legato had work for the Master to do.

* * *

Vash was nearly sprinting down the last few turnings in the passage that would lead to the end and then back to the little elevator in his eagerness to have the puzzle solved and the reward of another piece of the keystone bestowed upon him. Milly and Doc were barely keeping up and Jessica had already called it quits and was waiting back in the room with the lift in it that had taken them down through the three levels. It was almost done! Just a little more and he'd have the third piece.

Vash controlled his impatience, _barely_, as he all but thrust the last glyph-shpere into the little niche on top of the pedestal at the end of the catacomb. The pedestal slid into the wall, revealing a teleport pad at the end of it. Vash hesitated not a moment, but stepped on it along with Doc and Milly, and they were brought again back to the place where the three axes met. Jessica stood as soon as she saw them, yawning and blinking. It was already well past one by then but Vash couldn't care less.

"Let's go," was all he said as he stepped toward the circular lift pad in the center.

All three of the grids on the floor of the lift were glowing brightly now, for every time that Vash had solved a three-axis maze, its layer on the grid-sigil on the floor of the lift had lit up. Jessica trudged over, looking a little bit like a sulky child up past her bedtime, and the four of them stepped onto the elevator. The silvery ring in the stone around the pad between it and the floor faded away in a gleam and the pad started upwards again. Vash frowned a bit at that, but had to trust that the trial knew what it was doing. He'd partly expected that he would have to go downwards again as they had before. Perhaps it was only psychological, but he felt better about having to go upwards, less of that tightened-stress feeling of going deeper into the maw of the beast.

Shortly, they reached the large cylindrical chamber they had first entered in, with the winding staircase around the outer wall leading up to the door outside, and the three niches for the three colored spheres lining the wall at equal points from each other. The three niches were no longer empty as they had been at first. The one Milly had picked with the green sphere still occupied its niche, but now the other two were full as well, the blue and the purple spheres taking their places inside the wall-niches.

"Now what?" Jessica asked, looking around her.

Nothing was happening.

They didn't have long to wait for the answer to that question for as soon as the platform pulled up fully flush with the surface and the silver ring appeared anchoring it to the floor, there was a flash of light. The three globes in their niches along the wall flashed brightly and each of them shone out a beam of quasi-colored light, mostly white with a hint of violet or blue or green to it. The three lights beamed out and up, meeting at a point between their heads and then wrapped around each other in a spiral of light shining directly upwards into the ceiling of the chamber. Abruptly, the lights cut off, leaving behind only the soft glow of the sigil, but it was only for a moment. From the top of the ceiling there came a nimbus of white light, floating down gently, straightforwardly. In the center of the light was another uneven tetrahedron of glassy black stone, exactly like the first two had been, spinning lazily and with no particular pattern, like a toy in zero-gravity. Vash pulled out the larger piece of the keystone and the third piece flew directly over to it, settling in its place with a soft click. A greyish light pulsed over the surface as it fused together with the rest of the keystone.

Vash didn't tell anyone about the strange shiver and pulse that seemed to run through him. He closed his eyes for a second with a strange feeling that he wasn't in his own body anymore but was looking out through someone else's eyes. The hands before him were tiny, and there was a white cotton-gauze bandage over the finger of her/his left hand. She was tapping away at the strange, ephemeral keypad made of colored light in front of her. Her mind worried and distracted but not really distressed. Vash felt a strange pulse run through him, exactly the same one that he had felt when he touched the third piece of the keystone (and the other two now that he thought about it). The delicate female hand on the other body flew to her stomach and Vash was aware of a sharp, painful, burning feeling, like someone had taken a hot brand and touched it to her/his skin.

_Meryl_? he wondered to himself. Their combined presence felt familiar, as familiar to him as his own heartbeat. Vash felt a feeling of rightness at the sensation, as if the world, which had been spinning and tilting crazily all of this time had suddenly righted itself and he'd fond his center once again.

_Vash_? a familiar voice echoed in his own mind, like she was standing there whispering directly into his ear.

He blinked, startled, and as soon as the moment came, it was gone. Vash found himself alone in his own body. He was left feeling suddenly alone and bereft, and gave a small hurt whimper of loss as he stared down at his hand, holding an odd looking peice of keystone. He had felt her. For a single moment she had been there with him, in his mind and part of his being, intwined as intimately, perhaps even more so, than he ever had been with his twin. He thirsted for that contact, as much as any dying man ever longed for an oasis in the desert. The sudden, gripping loss and solitude was as real a wound on his soul as any of the wounds that had caused the scars on his body.

Vash shook himself out of it and sternly reminded himself to concentrate. There would be time for contemplation later, but right then, he had a job to do and the sooner her did it, the sooner her would get her safely back with him.

He studied the stone curiously for a brief moment. It was all planes and angles. It looked like someone had taken a pyramid and cut out a quarter-section of it from the base on up to the tip. He nodded to himself, here and there, things were beginning to take shape.

_At least I know she's still alive somewhere, and safe_ he thought to himself. That had not been a comfort he had had up until this point and the knowledge, no matter how it had gotten to him, was an enormous relief. It felt like he was breathing a little more easily for the first time in days.

"Good. Lets' go," was all Vash said upon receiving the rock, and he stepped off the pedestal and hurried up the stone steps.

He heard the sound of the others footsteps echoing on the bare stone, following him up to the surface.

They emerged into starlight, the uninhibited skies of the world glowing cold and bright in the chill night air. Vash looked over at the moons, absently counting them and judging their distance from the horizon; he'd had over a century of practice at it so he'd developed a pretty good internal clock by the stars and satellites. Vash ignored the pang he got when the last time he'd looked at the stars with _someone _ghosted into his mind. It had been after Legato, when he'd gone out the the cliffs at night, looking for some kind of solace, and _she _had come to him. Accompanyed with the pang of missing Meryl was also the thought that if he hadn't dragged her into his mess then she wouldn't currently be in danger. And hard on the heels of that thought was the darker thought that the only _real _reason she was in danger was that Knives had _put _her in it, had _stolen _her from him, had-

Vash cut off his thoughts with the ease of long practice. That way lay darkness, though Vash was coming to the realization that that other part of him was getting more insistent and harder to ignore. Legato had done his work well, alright. Vash no longer had that sacred moral base to start from, and he felt lost without that anchor. Always before Vash had been able to claim that there was no slippery slope for him to stand on, and that if he worked at it hard enough, was fast enough, was strong enough; he would be able to find a way to make it work. Leagto, the _bastard_, had proved otherwise.

He'd unlocked the secret box hin Vash's heart, the one filled with the twisted dark emotions of pain and anger and hatred, the one Vash always very carefully left alone. It had been torn open and now all of Vash's demons had come out to play. He was able to put a leash on them, but for how long? The incident with that other part of him, Crimson Diablo, had destroyed a town in a fit of rage... it wasn't safe for Vash to be around people anymore. Not until he'd found a way to gather up all those demons, stuff them back in that box slam down the lid, lock it, and thow away the key. But that would have to wait until he'd gotten Meryl back.

:_Still, it raises the question_,: Vash thought as they paced back toward the shuttle.

If he had to face his brother before he brought himself fully back under control what would happen? His former impeccable armor was now only hanging on by a thread and with a hole in it big enough to drive a SEEDs ship through. What if Knives did something that just pushed him over the edge? It seemed that Crimson Diablo wasn't disposed to _like _Vash's twin and Crimson was a _part _of him. He didn't like that fact; Vash didn't want to know that there was a part of him that failed to live up to Rem's teachings, that there was darkness and anger and rage and even hatred within his soul as well as the kindness and love and joy he nurtured. Much as Vash didn't want to admit to it, he was going to have to face up to the fact that deep down he resented Knives and saw him as a threat. But he also loved his brother and wanted to help him. Vash had won the day the last time, but that had been with the help of his friends, what would happen _this _time? It wasn't that Vash didn't have friends helping him, it was that it seemed there was a key component missing and Vash had a rpetty good idea just who that key componant was.

"A penny for your thought's Mister Vash?" Milly asked.

He looked over at her, not even bothering to try to cover it up with his usual grin. It wouldn't fool her anyway and he knew better than to try. It was _Milly _after all.

"I'm worried," he mumbled.

He was going to leave it at that but it was almost like some kind of magical force just pulled the words out of him and he found himself elaborating.

"I haven't been the same inside since... since Legato. I faced down my brother and the better half of me won out. I thought that was the end of the matter. I thought that it was the end of the war both with my brother and with myself. I thought... I thought I'd be done with this. But I'm not and it's worse than ever. Before, I could always fall back on what Rem told me and it always gave me hope and strength no matter what happened to me. Now I don't have that anymore and I miss it. The demons are out of the box and I don't know how to fight them."

Were it anyone else, Vash's words probably would have been something of a nonsequiter, but it was Milly and she understood what he was saying perfectly. They'd reached the ship and Vash, rather than go inside with Doc and Jessica, climbed one of the steel-rung maintenance ladders to the prow of the ship and sat on it looking out at the dark stars wheeling by overhead.

"What time is it Mister Vash?" Milly asked suddenly.

"Um... a little after two in the morning," he said mystified and a little hurt that she didn't seem to be paying attention to what he was saying.

But he should have known better.

"You know what time that is? Sempai told me," Milly said seriously.

"No... ah, early morning?" he guessed.

"She said it's the "hour of the wolf." It's that time between two and three in the morning when all of your fears are magnified and all you see is your regrets. She said her father used to take care of the problem with a large glass of whiskey for the wolf and a few shots more, in case it had puppies. And she told me a story about the wolf."

"What wolf?" Vash asked, having a hard time following her.

His mind caught momentarily on Milly's casual mention that Meryl's father had apparently been a drinker. That explained a lot.

'_You only drink like that when you have something you want to forget_,' she had once said plainly to him, with disgust after he'd spend a long night out drinking with a new friend named Frank Marlon early in thier association. She was such a tea-totaler, it seemed like there was a reason why.

"The wolf that the hour is for," Milly said as if it should be obvious. "Sempai told me that in every person's heart there are two wolves, one is made of hope and kindness and love and the other wolf is made of depair and rage and hatred, and that the two of them constantly fight one another for territory, as all dogs will."

"Huh? Did she tell you which one wins in the end?" he asked curiously.

"The one you feed," Milly replied as she slipped into the sliding door of the ship.

Vash smiled a little to himself. The one he fed huh? That sounded about right. It was better than pretending it didn't exist... because _that _wolf had come round about literally to bite him in the butt.

_Let's just keep moving._

Vash pulled out the softly gleaming stone that Meryl had given to him for safekeeping and looked at it for a moment. Moonlight white with traces of other colors in it flashing like opals with a liquid sheen like oil over water, the stone was warm to the touch probably from his own body heat but it was a small comfort to him having a connection to her however tenuous it was. It was also the way he had to get her back. vash pulled the black obsidian keystone out of his pocket.

:_If this thing gets much bigger_,: he thought to himself. :_It's not going to fit in my pocket_.:

He might have to get some kind of satchel for it or something. Vash tried very hard not to think the words man-purse. There was just no-way that he was letting such an object of obvious importance out of his sight for very long and he didn't know what further challenges awaited him to attain the next peice of the keystone, or any of the ones after that.

Vash dangled Meryl's necklace over the tip of the keystone and soft white light crawled in random patterns over the surface and a strong beam of white light shot out from the tip facing northward and a little to the east. They had their heading.

Vash got to his feet and took the access hatch down into the main part of the ship, ducked into the cockpit, started the ship and tapped in the commands to make best speed in that direction. It was time to go.


	38. the way it is

Jessica scuffed at the carpet on the floor of her room and fumed a little inwardly. It was all set to be the perfect day, well perhaps not _perfect, _but better than the days she'd had in a while. Better that the days since Brad had-

:_We were only friends_,: she thought hard at herself, irritatedly.

She pushed away the thoughts of all of the times when she'd been sent to her room as a punishment for some outrageous stunt she and her coterie had pulled off on the ship he'd snuck around on a secret passage on the outer ledge of the ship (despite the fact that this was dangerous and against the rules) to come and bring her extra food and treats to cheer her up. Or when she'd been given extra chores around the ship for some stupid minor infraction against the rules he'd just shown up and started helping her with them, even after she'd pointedly told him she wasn't interested in having his company and he should just leave.

"Now what kind of a man would I be if I let my girl do all the work without help?" he'd always ask with that stupid smile of his and start in letting her direct him, never complaining when she was harsh or shrewish with him. And when she'd grumble out a grudging thank-you he'd look like she'd handed him the world. Guilt twisted up inside of her again and she pushed that away.

She was in love with Vash, Brad knew that for she'd _told _him often enough. It wasn't _her _fault! What he chose to do with his life wasn't her fault! It had nothing to do with her that the man who'd loved her more than anything had sacrificed himself to save the man she loved just because he knew she'd be sad if Vash got hurt.

:_I-I love Vash_,: she said unsteadily to herself.

It wasn't fair that her traitorous heart kept reminding her that whenever Brad was around, stupid and annoying as he was, she'd always felt safe. There was no point in being sad about it now, no point in thinking about all they might have been. Brad was dead and that was the end of it. She would fare better to concentrate her energy on someone who was alive and who would one day love her back. She'd loved him all of her life, there was no-one who had loved Vash more than she, it just wasn't possible that he should love someone else.

:_But this Meryl_...: Jessica wondered to herself irritatedly.

Jessica had made certain to look extra nice for thier little outing, wearing the green and white jumper with the matching mantle that brought out her eyes and highlighted the creamy pale texture of her skin, flattered her figure and made her legs look longer and shapelier. He hadn't even noticed! All he'd said when she'd shown of for breakfast, posing and preening a little in the doorway for best effect was "oh good, you're ready." And she'd made sure to pack all of his favorite foods for their picnic lunch together. Not only had they spent the better part of the day underground (in bad lighting no less!) but he'd been reluctant to stop and actually eat the little feast she'd prepared and lugged around for him. All day long he'd been quiet and taciturn with those damned yellow sunglasses on, every time he'd tried to draw him out into conversation she'd gotten either monosyllabic or short replies, his mind clearly elsewhere. Milly had told her that they were on this quest to gather up those stupid stones so that Vash could rescue someone his brother had made off with.

Jessica partly wished that Vash's brother would have kidnapped _her _so that he would be as distracted for worry about her as he seemed to be for that Meryl woman. Oh she knew it was a stupid thing to wish, from the snippets of eavesdropped conversations she'd heard and that mess with that puppetmaster last year she had gathered that Knives was not a very nice person. But still, she just wanted him to pay attention to her, to look her way and not be thinking of someone else, was that too much to ask?

:_I wonder what she's like_?: Jessica fretted to herself.

By all accounts Vash liked big, buxom women with large... um _fronts _and cute faces. She'd heard that he was something of a flirt down on the surface, but Jessica hadn't worried about it then, he was certain to come to realize how deeply she loved him and see the good things that awaited him in the home she would make safe for him far away from his troubles.

:_She must be pretty, to have caught his eye_,: she fretted again, pacing a hole in the floor.

Her minds eye created the image of a veritable goddess, tall and beautiful with perfect curves, narrow waist and curvacious hips and large bust, beautiful skin, long perfect hair falling in waves to her waist (Vash like women with long hair) an alluring gaze with an expression of saintly kindness on her face. And she was probably a saint among women, kind and sweet and elegant because nothing less than the best would do for Vash.

Jessica sighed gustily, she wasn't bad looking and she'd often been told how sweet she was, but she was no saint, in fact there had been more than one occasion when she'd left Brad offer himself up to take the heat for something she'd done, knowing that he did it because he cared about her and didn't want to see her sad. No, she was no saint among women, but she could be a good wife. Cook and clean and raise kids and... other things that went on among a husband and wife. Jessica felt a happy blush crawl up into her cheeks at the thought, her heart giving its usual flutter of happiness at the idea of the life she was going to have with him someday.

:I_ have to figure out a way to get his thoughts away from her and on **me**_,: Jessica thought a little desperately.

Once she and Vash were married everything would be perfect, she'd no longer feel this sorrow because she'd be with the only man she'd ever loved and he would keep her perfectly happy. She just _knew _it.

* * *

After Remembrance and Angelina had gotten out of the bath, Meryl had eagerly claimed it for herself. She smelled like a tomas and she was sweaty and itchy, neither of those were states that made her very happy to be in. She'd descended on the hip-bath for cleaning herself off in (preparatory to a soak in the larger tub) with a feeling akin to hunger and immediately started scrubbing. Three blissful encounters with soapy water and a rough cloth later, Meryl was almost satisfied that she'd managed to scour off the dirt that seemed to have embedded itself into her skin (especially along the folds and wrinkles of her skin, in places she sweated the worst it had turned to some kind of dried cracked mud). Having taken the upper layer of her skin off and turned the resulting layer pink, Meryl switched to the waiting full-bath for a good long soak and couldn't contain the noise of pure bliss she'd felt at full-body contact with the hot steaming wonderful goodness that was a real bath.

She was aching in places she hadn't realized she could be sore, her back ached from carrying the heavy burden of her pack, her shoulders, her feet and calves and thighs good lord! Even her abdomen and arms... she'd been doing a lot more physical activity than even she was used to and she considered herself pretty active (maybe not as active as Vash, but who was?) but she was really sore and tired from this grueling hellish hike. her left hand still hurt as well, a dull throbbing burning ache that pulsed with fire at every beat of her heart. She was still afraid to look at what was under the frayed white gauze bandage.

:_I'm so tired, i just want to go home_,: Meryl thought longingly. Then frowned, her mind stumbling across something.

:_Huh. Where is home_?: she wondered at herself.

She hadn't been "Home" where her aunt and uncle had raised her since she'd gotten into college, even then on her short visits there was never a feeling of hominess about that place. it was like one of those model homes that people had to display thier wealth and status and you were never allowed to touch anything, there was not a junk drawer in the kitchen nor was there a hobby shack in the garage. She didn't think of that place as her home, just as a place where she had sometimes lived when she wasn't in boarding school. She had a modest little house in December where she had lived after taking the job at Bernardelli's. It was filled with all of her things, momentos from her travels, the desk and file cabinet neatly organized, everything to her taste, but she had been away from it more than she'd actually lived in it. Her mind had been circling round it and at last reluctantly came to rest on the thought that her home wasn't a place per say, the place she felt most at home in was with her friends. True, it was a heck of a job keeping things in line and manageable but Meryl liked being around them, Milly with her quiet strength and unexpected wisdom, she even sometimes appreciated Vash's craziness. Sometimes. And that was all. Really.

:_Heh, if that's home to me then I'm definitely not going to be having a rest anytime soon_,: she thought humorously to herself.

It was a dry humor though, she knew that trouble was following Vash. that same trouble had sort of resulted in her kidnapping but Meryl had no regrets about it (even if she was missing a finger and it hurt abominably). If it hadn't been her that was taken, it would have been Milly and the thought of Milly being hurt was just not to be borne. Milly was her best friend as well as her junior partner and if Meryl had ever had a little sister she wanted her to be just like Milly so Meryl was as protective of her as she was of her own family. Aside of that, if Meryl hadn't been taken, she wouldn't have wound up on the train with the pacifist twit and the angel, and more importantly and she wouldn't have found out what had happened to her brother.

:_And I wouldn't now be arming myself to walk into the dragons maw to go and rescue him_,: she thought.

Hard on the heels of that thought was the most recent strangeness to come over her, while she'd been quietly working away on her new project waiting for the bath to clear out she'd gotten that burning sensation along her skin again. She'd been all the way across the room from the fire she'd summoned up as a trial so she knew it hadn't been that.

Meryl took in a deep breath, steeling herself. She'd been putting this off, saying she just didn't have a quiet moment to herself to examine it more closely but the truth of the matter was that the strange things was unnerving and frightening to her. She didn't know what was happening to her own body and that scared her in her bones. But she wasn't going to run anymore.

She'd gotten another of those sharp burning sensations crawling along her skin like the feeling of a current of water when Meryl pushed it over her skin, invisible and barely tangible but in this case quite painful and unexplicable.

:_Okay, you can do this, just look down_.:

Meryl steeled herself once again closed her eyes, tilted her head downward, and mentally prepared herself for whatever horrible sight awaited her. It had felt like a burning brand on her stomach so reason stood that it might not look very pretty. Then she opened her eyes and forced herself to look at her belly. For a long moment she blinked, frowning.

Well it wasn't horrible. it was strange, but not horrible.

Centered around her navel was a spiraling, twisting knotwork of lines and bursts curling across her skin like little dragons in a spiderweb of lines too intericate for her to follow with her eye. She could get the general pattern of the main lines but the smaller lines, fine as a cobweb were too detailed to follow easily. The lines twisted and spiraled up in a never-ceasing knotwork out from her belly, down towards her thighs and up to the first rib of her chest, fading there like they were somehow unfinished. The oddest thing about this new inexplicable tattoo was that it didn't seem to be made of _ink_; the delicate filigree lines were composed of something that looked like liquid quicksilver running over her skin. It was like someone had taken the purest of silver, the kind that shines white in the sunlight, and splashed it in shimmering patterns, glistening like water droplets, on her body. The lines moved with the play of muscles and flesh as easily as her own skin. They felt neither hot nor cold, not hard or soft, they just felt like a regular part of her skin, yet when she waved her hand in front of the design it reflected a blob of flesh-color like a wavy silver mirror. Meryl tried scrubbing at it and the flesh beneath the marks went pink gradually but the marks remained unchanged.

:I_'m officially creeped out_,: she thought to herself.

She knew that the design, whatever it was and however the hell it had gotten there, hadn't been so large _at first_. The first time she'd felt it it had just been a small pattern around her navel. The second time she'd felt that burn on her flesh the strange patterns had expanded outward and now it seemed for the third time that it was getting even bigger.

:_So, what's causing it_?: Meryl wondered to herself.

She thought about what she was doing each separate incident that the strange expanding tattoo had burned its way onto her flesh and nothing noteworthy came to mind.

:_Maybe I was right the first time and this is just a side-effect of me using that weird ability I have now_,: she thought.

If so, perhaps the more she used it the bigger the tatoo would get.

:_If that's the case, then what happens when it expands all over me_?: she wondered, feeling fearful and aprehensive.

Would it kill her? What would it do to her? What was it? And why was this happeneing to her?

:_If my brother weren't in such serious trouble I'd go and see a doctor about this_,: meryl thought to herself.

She doubted somehow that a doctor might be able to tell her what the hell was going on.

:_Well, there is one person who **might **be able to tell me_,: Meryl thought reluctantly.

Part of her was _happy _in her ignorance, the less she knew about the weird shit her family was supposedly into, the less it was actually a part of _her _life. Well, whether she liked it or not, it was a part of her life now, and in this instance ignorance might actually kill her.

:_Besides, I've always thought that the person who coined the term ignorance is bliss must have died a really horrible death with a very surprised look on his face_.:

* * *

**Only a quick edit this time, I'm so darned busy its ridiculous. I recall vaguely that someone sent me a reveiw saying they wanted to beta for me. That's great I'd really appreciate the help! Shoot me a PM and I'll doc x you the next few chapters. Thanks a bunch. And to all the rest of you loyal reveiwers, you guys own my soul. Thanks for the encouragememnt. **

**Oh, and is it just me or is this fic missing the chapter with the part in it where Meryl actually builds the little underground lair they are escaping from the storm in? I can't recall if I posted it or missed it.  
**


	39. SEEDs and ANGELs

**Here it is! Here it is! Exposition _ba-by_! **

* * *

"Gosh, it's really going on out there, isn't it?" Remembrance remarked to no-one in particular as the sound of the winds screamed and shrieked through the rock formations of the basalt lands they had been traversing before the storm had descended on them. The force of the winds seemed to shake the very stone, though that was probably just her imagination.

"I wonder what it looks like," she continued, the fury of the storm and being closed in under rock making her pensive.

She knew better than to try to go out and see it, Meryl had warned her that the force of the blast winds and the sand in them had enough power behind her to scour her flesh from her bones and Remembrance believed her.

Remembrance looked over at Angelina who was curled up under a blanket napping in front of a "fire" hovering over a glowing circle with signs on it in the floor of the cave. The fire was warm enough but it wasn't burning from any source that she could see, it seemed just a bit eerie. Once again she couldn't help but make mental comparisons between Marcus' use of his channels and Meryls' use of hers. Marcus would have been able to light something on fire by drawing enough energy off from his source and creating heat that way, but it was entirely likely that the smaller, more contained method simply would not have occurred to him. Of course, why would it? Marcus had all of the power he could ever possibly _need _in his Bondmate and it certainly did not hurt him to use his channels the way it hurt Meryl to tap into the raw scortching power of a Source stone. Using the grid system was a neccesity for Meryl, to make use of every single last bit of power, parsimoniously and with great deliberation. Marcus was under no such constraints, he could sling power about to do whatever he wanted all day long and not break a sweat.

:_So, one has all the power he needs and none of the control_,: Remembrance thought with irony. :_And the other has all of the control anyone could ever ask for and none of the power._:

If she could convince Meryl to seek out a bondmate, what a fine Resonant she would make!

:_iIdon't think that **that's** going to happen though_,: Remembrance thought with reluctant pity.

She'd been listening with all of her senses open when Meryl had been discussing what had happened to her father and about her brother bonding off. Meryl had been absolutely _horrified_ at the news, like he'd just been diagnosed with an incurable disease. The woman was dead certain in her heart of hearts that he was going to come to nothing but grief by having a bondmate. Of course it was natural that she would feel that way, after all, her father had bonded off, and look what horrors had happened to _him_. Remembrance just couldn't argue logically against that sort of visceral certainty.

:_She doesn't just have daddy issues_,: Remembrance thought. :_She's got an entire subscription_!:

Remembrance had reluctantly concluded that, while Meryl might be willing to help out with the project on her own, she wouldn't be willing to bond off in order to do so. She was just simply too emotionally traumatized by what happened to her father to even consider it. Asking her to take a Bondmate would be akin to asking a person with a fear of heights to go skydiving.

:_Probably better this way anyway_,:Remembrance reluctantly concluded. :_There's only one of her, and two of them. And they've always been so close, I can't see causing a rift in the relationship over a girl.:_

Remembrance then got an odd feeling along her empathic senses. Angelina was trying to communicate with her, but the Angel couldn't understand or use words without her bondmate and Remembrance couldn't pick up on the more subtle nuances of angelic communication, so all she got was a vague feeling of uncertainty. Or was that irony? Remembrance couldn't tell and had not the first idea of how to communicate with the angel. Remembrance did get the feeling that the Angel found something that Remembrance had thought humorous, but Remembrance did not know why it was so. She shrugged, dismissing it from her mind.

Meryl emerged a few moments later wrapped up in a relatively clean cloth and placed her recently scrubbed clothes on a string strung between the walls of the cave near the fire to dry.

"Miss Remembrance," Meryl said clearly, sitting herself next to her on the blanket near the fire to keep warm while their clothes dried.

Remembrance was busy trying to detangle the mess that her hair had become over the past few days of constant travel. Meryl silently took the comb from her and began to gently work her way through the matted snarls, from the very bottom up.

"Yes?" Remembrance questioned, leaning her head back a little. Meryl was gentle enough that getting her hair combed out felt good.

"You said that you convinced my brother to bond off to Angelina," Meryl didn't bother repressing the tone of disapproval in her voice, remembrance had obviously not made a friend in her with _that _decision.

"It wasn't so much convinced as facilitated," Remembrance replied forthrightly. "Marcus had already made up his mind about the matter."

"But you do admit that you were the one who gave him the information in the first place," meryl countered.

Remembrance suppressed a flash of annoyance, this woman must have been trained like a lawyer. Her brother had once said that Meryl could find a point and hold it dogmatically, especially if she thought she was right. At the same time Remembrance could sense the underlying worry and distress that Meryl was hiding under that tenacious cross-examination; she was worried that her brother was going to get hurt.

"Marcus heard the call," Remembrance replied. "If matters hadn't taken the course they had, _we _wouldn't be here now."

We, meaning herself and Angelina.

"I don't understand," Meryl muttered, sounding mutinous and unhappy. "Why is all of this happening?"

Remembrance felt another surge of pity for her. She sounded like an ordinary woman that had been thrown in a situation way out of her depths and just didn't know where to start comprehending. Remembrance recalled that she had had to explain everything about the Gaea Project to Marcus first before he was really in a position to understand what he was getting into. The ignorance in this family was appalling. Of course, it was only to be expected; it _had _been over a hundred years, it was only natural that some things would be lost over time.

"How much do you know about the other part of yourself?" Remembrance questioned. "The Resonant part."

"Not much, and I suspect, not as much as I used to," Meryl replied. "I've only recently started to remember things that I'd forgotten long ago. A few weeks ago, if you had asked me to see someone's meridians or even about my own channels, I would have looked at you like you'd lost your mind and started considering calling a mental institute to see if there were any inmates missing."

"You mean to say that all of this is recent? But I thought you'd used your abilities all of your life," Remembrance said.

"No, I only recently discovered, or _re_discovered, the fact that I had them," Meryl replied. "I think part of me must have just repressed the memories of it because of what happened in my hometown and how everyone disappeared."

"Wait, wait, wait," Remembrance said. "_Disappeared_?"

"Marcus didn't tell you?" Meryl questioned.

Remembrance shook her head in negation.

"It's news to me," she said.

"That's the reason why I was sent to my Aunt and Uncles to live. The town I grew up in, Stryfe... all the people in it _disappeared_ overnight, even my father. No-one knew how or why. I was the only one they ever found. But there are already so many emergencies and mysteries in this world that this one never got solved. I don't even really remember all that much about what happened, just waking up the next morning in my bed and there was no-one around. I scrounged around an abandoned town for a while looking for people and when the patrol rode through at the end of the week they took me with them back to December. I answered questions in thier station for a week and they put me in a temporary home, then a week later my Aunt and Uncle showed up and took me home with them."

Remembrance tried to quell her rising dismay at Meryl's matter-of-fact recitation of events that would have traumatized an adult. Children really were pretty adaptable. Of course, they paid for it later in life.

"And in all the time after that you didn't remember anything about your life with your father? You never used your abilities?"

That seemed pretty unbelievable, a young woman would probably have occasion at least a few times to use an edge if she had it. High school for example was a monkey jungle, if there was anything that could help a young woman survive that place intact she'd probably be forced to use it just to survive.

"I wasn't encouraged to discuss my life with my father and my uncle has forbidden me to speak of his "aberration." I didn't want my family or my new friends to think I was weird, so I never told anyone or showed anyone about it and after a few years... I just forgot that I'd ever had it I guess."

Wow, that was some high-quality repression she had going there. No wonder her brother thought she was so uptight, this girl had more issues than times magazine.

:_It must be awful, going through your life knowing deep down that you're not like everyone else, trying so desperately to fit in so your new family will like you until one day you just convince yourself that you're perfectly normal and repress all signs of abnormality. That poor girl_.:

"I guess we'll have to start in the beginning then," Remembrance said, not giving away her inner thoughts about Meryl to the subject of them.

She had a feeling that Meryl didn't respond well to pity.

"How much do you know about project SEEDs?" Remembrance asked instead.

"That it was the way my ancestors crossed the stars from old earth in spaceships looking for a new world to live on," Meryl answered promptly.

It sounded like a textbook answer, and it probably was.

"Just the very basics then" Remembrance said dryly.

There was a whole lot more to the project than just that, but most of it wasn't common knowledge even to the original colonists, and there apparently had been a massive information dump over the last century.

"I also know that the engines at the core of the ships are powered by angels, and most people think that they're nothing more than an urban legend," Meryl added sounding both miffed and pleased with herself.

Remembrance raised and eyebrow, she wasn't sure if that was common knowledge or not, but what Meryl had said suggested "not".

"Do you know what a Plant Angel is?" Remembrance countered.

"No," meryl said. "I don't think anyone does, not anymore anyway."

"How about your own family?" Remembrance asked. "You are a Resonant, did your father ever talk about that?"

"I'm remembering a little now and then," Meryl said. "He didn't seem to know much about what he.. er, _we _are himself. I know he kept journals though. He wrote in them faithfully every day of his life. They disappeared too, the same night he died. But he thought that our three-or-four-times-great-grandfather was the original possessor of that... thing. The thing that makes my father and my brother and, ah, and _me_, so different. He thought it had something to do with the SEEDs project, but he didn't know what. He tried investigating it, but his leads sent him off in some pretty strange directions and eventually he wound up Bonded off and that's when the Lingering happened."

"It might please you to know that he was on the right track," Remembrance encouraged her. "Your ancestor was part of the original project SEEDs... I should start at the beginning, I suppose."

"It'd probably help."

Remembrance decided that she was going to ignore Meryl apparently grumpy mood. Remembrance's empathy told her that Meryl was more than grumpy, she was feeling lost and afraid and increasingly uncomfortable talking about something that she'd so long repressed and tried to erase from her existence. Well, now it was the return of the repressed.

"Project SEEDs was _more _than just the ships filled with cryogenic freezing pods that carried people across the stars to a new world," Remembrance said. "That was the public face of the project and the part that everyone was told about. Most people thought that "seeds" was sort of a neat little catch-all phrase to describe what we were doing, taking all of the dna of humanity and transporting it into foreighn soil to grow and flourish, kind of like a seed blowing on the wind. They also thought that the term "plant" to describe the core of the ship, or later as a use for "power plant" was nothing more than a further play on words. Well, they were right and they were wrong. Project SEEDs encompassed far more than just freezing people and loading them on ships to go to another world. There was another part of the project, the main core of it, that was known only to the original scientists who developed it, and a few other key people. It was called the Gaea Project."

"Gaea Project?" Meryl asked.

Remembrance sensed curiosity being added into the simmering cauldron of emotions that was Meryl was this point though she was so controlled none of the tension slipped into her body language. Remembrence continued

"The Gaea Project was a dream given form, a way to create an Eden for people to live in on a brand new world. It was also a way to test the "Gaea Device." That device was supposed to be a way to terraform an uninhabitable wasteland into a lush, healthy garden. The original scientists had wanted a way to redeem what their ancestors had done to the Earth by finding a way to fix up the mess our ancestors had created, The Gaea Device was supposed to have done that. Project SEEDs was something like a test run for the Gaea Device, the original scientists were not only interested in space travel and colonizing the stars, but they also decided that if they could take a harsh barren world and use the Gaea Device to create a perfect garden then it would work equally well on the wasteland that had become the Earth. SEEDs was supposed to have had the double benefit of giving people a brand new world to live on as well as giving us a way to fix the old one."

"Nice. Very neat," Meryl said approvingly of the two-pronged approach. "What does this have to do with me?"

"I'm getting to that," Remembrance said. "A project of this magnitude required technology on an even more intricate and higher-performance level than had ever been tried before. Just think of how much work, data maths and statistics it would take to come up with several working eco-nomes, from the large plants down to even the tiny bacteria in it, taking into account innate planetary terrain and all of the changes our interference would make on it, as well as weather systems, thier influence on the flora and thus the fauna and other factors and have them all work together and not destroy each other or the people living in it."

"Sounds like quite the undertaking," Meryl said.

Remembrance could practically feel her brain swirling from trying to wrap her mind around that concept. Complex didn't even _begin _to cover it.

"Yes, you can certainly say that. The scientists putting all of this together decided that, one, a regular super computer just wasn't going to do the trick, and two, there was going to need to be a massive power source for the initial push once the ground-work for the Gaea Device had been laid, something like a start-up fee. So, in order to accomplish those ends they ventured further into the realms of organic technology than anyone had originally thought it was safe to go and developed the plant Angels."

"Those are organic technology?" Meryl gasped, clearly shocked.

"The cells that make up their bodies are in actuality, nano-bots. The proteins that form their flesh are in fact a synthetic protein and while they have all of the basic characteristics that give them a humanoid form they are in fact, not human. This is why they are able to channel massive, massive amounts of energy from Spirituus Mundi into this world without burning up from it. Their collective hive mind also enables them to work together on all of the various aspects of the Gaea device and not step on any toes. That's the original design anyway."

"So let me get this straight," Meryl said. "The same..beings, entities, whatever you want to call them, that make up the engine cores of the ships were developed to make up the Gaea Device? From nano-technology? So... so you're saying they're what? Bio-organic machines?"

"In a way, yes, although I personally think that they are much more than that," Remembrance said quietly. "Plant Angels were developed to extrapolate and contain all the data for the model of the terraformation device that the original scientists had worked out. And they were created to channel energy from another place into this world rather that trying to rely on nuclear fusion reactors as an energy source."

"Why not use fusion reactors?" Meryl asked.

"Technology that had to do with the splitting of atoms was banned universally all over the world after the Cataclysm," Remembrance said seriously. "I don't know if Earth history is taught here on this world but the world that had formerly been a green world full of life was turned to an nearly completely barren wasteland by pollution and poisons tainting the atmosphere and changing the weather patterns, but more than that the wasteland was caused by a war that used dirty weapons and atom bombs. After the short bloody war was over every nation and territory still left standing signed a treaty to never use nuclear technology ever again for any reason, even its beneficial ones."

"So they needed another source of energy then," Meryl surmised.

"Yes. Due to the dense dusty cloud cover solar power was out so they found other methods of harvesting energy. It was in this time period that the Psi-wave was discovered."

"It's been mentioned as a brainwave, but not even my father was very clear on what it is," Meryl prompted.

"The Psi wave is an energy wave produced by the human brain that vibrates on a special frequency that enables it to affect the molecular level of the world around it. Every human produces some very small part of that wave."

"Everyone?" Meryl asked, surprised. "I thought it was only people who could... do things, like move stuff with their minds or hear peoples thoughts."

"No, it's everyone," Remembrance said firmly. "I, and a few others, have a theory that this Psi-wave is what allows people to connect with a part of something that is _greater_."

"I don't understand," Meryl said frankly.

"People connect with each other with words and body language," Remembrance confirmed then leaned forward as she said intensely. "But we are all connected to each other on a level that is greater than that."

Meryl paused and looked down, her voice was quiet and subdued when she said

"My father... once told me the exact same thing. He said that we are all made from stardust, and that the very basis that formed every single person in the whole world was the same. He said that there is a part of all of us that is part of a whole greater than the sum of all of its parts. He said that it has been called many things over the ages, some call it god, others call it the wheel of destiny, Jung referred to it as the Collective Unconscious. My father liked to use William Butler Yeats' term, Spirituus Mundi... it's Latin for something like the spirit of the world or the universal soul. He said that it was like another expression of energy, an energy that holds the force of human creativity."

"Yes exactly!" Remembrance said, relieved that she at least had some exposure to the concept.

"What separates humanity from animals isn't that we can use tools or our brains, it's our ability to think in abstracts," Remembrance went on.

Meryl at least appeared to be partly interested in what she had to say.

"Art, for example, fills no useful purpose in our lives and yet people have been making art in one form or another for as long as there have been what could rightly be called humans. And what is art but an expression of human creativity? Everyone is creative or expressive in one form or another and we believe that that ability comes from our connection with the universal soul or Spirituus Mundi if you like. There is an energy, a force of creation out there that is greater than all of us and part of all of us."

"And angels...?" she trailed off.

"Precisely," Remembrance confirmed. "Angels are able to tap into this greater reservoir of the human creative force. They live partly in this world and partly in another and are able to act as gateways, channeling energy from Spirituus Mundi into this one. Their artificial bodies have been designed to be able to support a greater strength of Psi-wave than even the most powerful human mind could ever hope to."

"I don't entirely get it," Meryl said, still confused. "Plant angels are beings made of organic nano-technology that can tap into a great reservoir of human creative energy and bring it into this world. They used it to run ships and we use it to run our cities. Doesn't that make them essentially... Psi-dynamos?"

"..." Remembrance hesitated. "Ye-es, I suppose you could technically say that. The original scientific investigation into creating a stronger Psi-wave to use as an energy source to replace nuclear fusion and solar and wind power on old earth certainly had that sort of connotation. They started out using human test subjects that were inherently capable of producing a larger Psi-wave than normal, telepaths, telekinetics, empaths and the like and altering them, but the result was that the greater the Psi-wave that their subject was able to produce, the more mentally unstable it made them."

Meryl looked like there was something she really wanted to add to that but held it back and remained silent. Remembrance shrugged, it wasn't exactly like they were bosom companions after all, Meryl struck her at the type that took a while to warm up to anyone.

"Even their most successful human test subject was not capable of producing a Psi-wave of a great enough magnitude to create the amounts of energy they were looking for. Every time a person came close to creating a Psi-wave of any strength he or she... ah, burned up."

"You make it sound like he exploded or something."

:_Geeze! it's like she can read minds_!: Remembrance marveled to herself.

According to the reports she'd read, a good many of them had exploded from the sheer force of the energies trying to flow through them. The human body simply was not equipped to deal with that kind of power.

"I suppose it was a case of the spirit being willing but the flesh being weak," was all Remembrance said about it. "They tried modifying a human being as the next logical step, altering them from the cells out to enable them to be able to handle a Psi-wave of sufficient strength to run a city-dome. There was some mixed success at that..."

"How mixed?" Meryl asked curiously.

"Some of the first batch of test subjects could harness a sizable Psi-wave with no ill effects, others were unable to handle one at all, and still others could produce one intermittently, but it and they, were unstable. It was soon concluded that even altered human test subjects was simply too great a risk."

"One of them got drunk on power and went on a rampage didn't they?" Meryl surmised from what was not said.

Remembrance stared at her incredulously.

"Geeze, get out of my head," she muttered, nettled.

That was exactly what had happened. According to the logs it had taken a lot to take that person down. Remembrance shook her head a little, Miss Meryl seemed content to accept what only lay on the surface for so many things, but she could be surprisingly sharp about some things. The young woman continued with her narrative

"The project to harness the Psi-wave was nearly entirely abandoned until the scientists from the Gaea Project decided they needed their organic technology super-computers and energy devices. They put two and two together and... the Angels were created."

"That's great," Meryl said sarcastically. "Men creating little gods in their own image."

Remembrance restrained the urge to glare at her for the commentary.

"The first successful Angel was able to channel enough power from her Gate to run three city-domes and all minor territory shields within a ten mile radius and the instrumentality that harnessed the power she produced only harvested a mere point oh one percent of her overall output. Victor Valintinez and his partners weren't satisfied with that and the next successful test batch of Artificial Nano-tech Gestalt Enabled Lifeforms was able to channel even more energy. For all of their power and capabilty, those A.N.G.E.L.s are very delicate, their gates react to every little thing so the scientists had no choice but to put them in a safe, controlled environment until they could find a way to stabilize them."

"So you're saying that the Angels were put into those bulbs not just to contain them and harvest their energy, but to protect everyone else around them from the massive power one of them can put out and to protect them from hurting everyone else? And That's why that horrible bonding thing is neccessary! That's why my ancestor was called "resonant"..."

She looked a little pole-axed the poor dear. It was a lot to take in all at once.

"An angel outside of the bulb will start to react to every psi-wave that comes near it," Remembrance supplied. "Which is a danger not just to her but to the people she comes in contact with, too many Psi-wave of different frequencies coming at her all at once will destabilize the psi-wave she produces and..."

"Big bada-boom?"

"Very big bada-boom."

Meryl winced and looked like she was remembering something.

"Very big indeed," she murmured softly.

Remebrance partly wanted to ask about it, but she didn't think Meryl was ready to share her inner thoughts with her... or with anyone.

"So eventually Resonants were developed to stabilize thier Psi-wave by locking it onto only one frequency. The result is that thier minds melded and bonded permanently. Now that that hurdle had been overcome, the scientists could continue developing the Gaia Project and project SEEDs. And so they did."

"They created more Angels to run the ships and develop the terraformation routines and then set out, right?" Meryl guessed.

"That's right," Remembrance agreed. "The original name for project SEEDs was actually an acronym for its purpose; the plant Angels carrying the data for a garden to foreign soil."

"What's it mean?" meryl asked curiously.

"SEEDs stands for "Scientifically Engineered Entity Diaspora.: Plant Angels, after the first few test runs to create artificial cells from nanobots was successful, had originally been called "scientifically engineered entities," Remembrance explained. "The term "angel" came later, after the development of the angel-arms as method of determining when one of the entities had gone from passive mode to active mode and accessed its Gate. Angel is actually another acronym, it stands for Artificial Nano-tech Gestalt Enabled Lifeform."

If Meryl hadn't been sitting down, she very much looked like she would have dropped right there. It made Remembrance puzzled and a little wary since it seemed to her that Meryl knew something about the subject matter that she was keeping close to her chest. The young scientist shrugged and continued

"But the Angels were only half of the device. The other half were the Resonants. That's your ancestors by the way."

Okayyy," Meryl said quietly, her head still reeling form all of the information that Remembrance had given her thus far. "What was a Resonant originally supposed to do then? I mean, if the Plant Angel's carry all of the data for creating the Gaea device and also provide the energy to power the device, then what else could they possibly need?"

"I don't know whether it was because the nature of the plant angels themselves made them unable to handle the fine tuned work required for channeling and utilizing that power to the utmost, or if the scientists who developed them simply didn't trust such a vast amount of power in the hands of a being that wasn't at all human, but Resonants were developed to be the other half of the system."

"I don't understand, aren't Resonant's a little redundant?" Meryl asked. "Plant Angels are the cores of the ships, and the hearts of the cities after the Great Fall, but they function perfectly well without the intercession of a Resonant to channel. I mean... right?"

"They function," Remembrance corrected gently. "But not _well_. The Plant Angels were never meant to be permanently connected to machines. The angels were more than the core of the ship anyway, in a sense, they _were _the ship. They controlled all of its functions and navigations. Resonants started out as regular humans and through a series of processes were changed on the genetic level into something... other."

"Other?" Meryl said.

Remembrance could sense her getting that creeped-out feeling again. And to be honest, it probably was a little scary. Meryl had trained herself to think of herself as being nothing more than an ordinary woman, probably with the underlying repressed fear that if anything unusual about her was discovered she would be censured. Marcus had had no such issues and when asked about the idea of transitioning over had said "where do i sign?" She didn't know whether his eagerness to jump off a cliff without looking down was bravery or foolhardiness. She suspected that part of it stemmed from a perverse desire to do something that would really piss his father off. From what she'd understood from the little he'd said about it and what she'd "picked up" from her empathy, Marcus did not have a good relationship with his father while the man had been alive, and it hadn't gotten any better after he'd died.

Remembrance paused and thought about how to phrase what she wanted to say. It was a pretty complicated explanation. Finally she simply drew a figure on the light patina of dust on the cave floor, it looked like a twisted ladder.

"Normal human DNA looks like this, a double helix," she said, then drew another figure beside it, a strange picture with three spires twisting about themselves with rungs meeting in the middle.

"Your DNA, and your fathers and your uncle's and your brother's, looks like this," Remembrance illustrated. "Two of the rungs are ordinary human DNA like you'd get from your mother and father in the fashion of a normal baby, but your family possesses a latent strand of synthetic DNA which, as you and your kin are gestating in the womb creates a sort of latent sub-code in all of your cells and proteins. Now for the last several generations this programing in your body and your ancestors body had remained dormant for the most part, there might be some aberrations but nothing as great as your ancestors were originally capable of. When it is activated this latent strand will actually change your physiological makeup down past even the cellular level. Like Plant Angels you won't be entirely carbon-based, but a good part of your cellular structure will incorporate silicon-based elements as well."

"Silicon?" Meryl questioned.

"It's the closest thing to carbon in molecular structure, and it enables you to conduct energy better without coming to damage."

"So I'd become what, some sort of half-human half-silicon-based lifeform?" Meryl questioned.

Remembrance could tell right away that Meryl didn't like the idea at all.

"That's not necessarily a bad thing," Remembrance added, trying to sound soothing. "A fully Transtioned Resonant has a number of advantages. Greater speed, strength and reflexes. It more difficult to actually hurt them because their flesh is a carbono-silicate mix, their bones don't break easily because they're now a mix of calcium and crystalized silicon. They have the ability to heal about any injuries both to themselves and their bondmate, and the power that they can wield is... most impressive."

"Uh-huh. And what's the catch?" Meryl asked dryly.

:_Figures that's what she'd ask_.:

"The catch is that, due to the genetic restructuring brought on by transitioning from a full human in to something else, your brain will no longer produce a Psi-wave, and you need one to survive, so, you will need to bond yourself to someone who can provide the life-energy for you to live on without burning out the two of you."

"Like what happened with my father," Meryl said.

Remembrance could practically hear her say to herself 'well _that's_ certainly one thing that I won't be trying thankyouverymuch!' she could see on Meryl's face that her mind was already set against it. Still Remembrance tried one more time to get her to see the advantages or at least consider it a _little_.

"Your brother certainly seems to enjoy it quite a bit."

"My brother is an idiot," Meryl replied bluntly.

"He is not," Remembrance protested. "He just has an... innocent enthusiasm. He likes being able to show off by leaping up cliffsides in one jump, like he was on the surface of a lower gravity world. He can also reshape objects just by moving them in his hands, he can shape a lump of iron like it's clay. He also likes the ability to snap his fingers and light things on fire or blow them up."

"Figures that'd be the first thing he'd master," Meryl grunted. "Next thing you know Bernardelli's is going to be assigning me to look after _him_. And if he can do all of these things, then why doesn't he just use his new superpowers to escape and save me the trouble of rescuing him?"

"It's because he's so far away from his bondmate and I think someone's put some kind of dampening effect on their link. I think they can reach each other even over a distance, but the use of their link is greatly inhibited."

"Well, we're just going to have to un-inhibit it, aren't we?"

Remembrance didn't have anything to say to that, and Meryl had gotten that steely look in her eye. She was a woman on a mission and had clearly filed away all of the information that Remembrance had just told her to sift through at her leisure some time later on. Remembrance was just glad that Meryl Stryfe had not thought to ask the very relevant and pertinent question "just exactly how is it that you know all of this?" answering that one would have been more complicated than she was prepared for right then. There would be time for a fuller explanation later, after they had gotten Marcus back.

* * *

**Oi! What a doozy. This one certainly took some time to edit. I wouldn't blame anyone if they had to go back and read it again, it's got a lot of stuff in it packed into a small amount of space. So, what did you all think? It's this that I've been building to for the last thirty chapters or so. It's all, or mostly, out in the open now. I, personally, am very pleased with the Acronyms. **


	40. Dreaming My Dreams

She was doing drills. First a Source Node, then a channel spiraling out of it, then nodes bursting out along the channels like little flowers blooming along a vine. They were small grids, and Meryl didn't junction them to a Source to make them activate, but she built them up like grey mist between her hands and then banished them one after another after another, clearly pushing herself to achieve greater speed. Her eyes were closed and her face set in concentration. She was forcing her mind and body to accommodate the rigid control and discipline of the new drills she'd set for herself likely until she was note perfect in at least one aspect of it. Laying a solid groundwork. Whatever else Remembrance could say about Meryl Stryfe, she couldn't say that she lacked self-discipline. Maybe she was a little too self-controlled.

:_Definitely way different from her brother's method of handling things_,: Remembrance thought.

Her brother just pulled power from his bondmate and turned thought into reality without any steps in between. It didn't always work very well for him either. Granted he was not at all shy about trying again, but Marcus rarely thought about things before he tried them and it had gotten him into trouble a time or two in his trial-and-error stage. Meryl was very structured and orderly, where as Marcus, after transitioning over and bonding off hadn't wanted to limit himself to the rigid structure of the Grid and its weighing and measuring of parameters, its deconstruction and reconstruction of things on the tiniest level... he'd found all of that terribly tedious. Anything new he wanted to try he just went out and _attacked_, he didn't care if he failed a few times as long as he had fun trying new things with it. He didn't care for the minute, finicky attention to detail that seemed to characterize Meryl's way of doing things, but Remembrance had to admit that Marcus' way, though less exact certainly seemed a lot easier and took a lot less time to master.

Marcus was also much more fluid in his channeling, he didn't approach it like it was some alien thing that someone was going to come along and scold him about, but rather like his own channels were an extension of himself at all times. The only time Remembrance had seen Meryl approach her abilities with anything other than a wary trepidation was when she'd had to fight those men on the sand-train thingy. Even now, although Meryl was using her powers, Remembrance could sense a sort of grim determination about it; perhaps it was the situation they were in, but Remembrance didn't think so... Meryl just plain didn't _like _to use her gifts. They frightened her and made her uncomfortable, this much Remembrance could discern just by looking at her. Marcus approached channeling with a sense of joy and wonder, Meryl went at them with nothing more than determined duty.

Remembrance sighed and shook her head. Poor thing. She was never going to be comfortable in her own skin again, at least not until she faced her own knowledge that she was something _other _than what she'd convinced herself she was.

* * *

Vash looked around him at the sight of the empty blanket. The sky above him was purest blue and the landscape around him shimmered like heat-haze along the horizon of the desert. All times before the dream-scape had always comforted him because inevitably, there _she'd_ be, speaking words of comfort and wisdom and faith to him. Giving him an anchor to orient himself on, giving him a rock to steady himself on, and now there was nothing there but the whisper and howl of the winds. He'd given up _her _voice in order to follow his own, and it seemed that in so doing had lost the comforting presence of her in his dreams.

He sat up and looked around, seeing for the first time not just a shimmering horizon but also realizing that there were several other settlements nearby in the distance. He looked around him in the sourceless sunlight that seemed to be bearing down at him with relentless heat-pressure, scorching the air and drying him out.

In one direction there seemed to be a darkening sky, spiraling grey-black around a twisted cone-shaped cairn jutting up into the clouds. Vash could sense a very purposeful malignancy radiating off from it, a cold, killing anger. Okay, so that was definitely one place he didn't want to go a'knocking. In another direction he saw what looked to be a city, protected under a great thick dome. He knew with that strange sort of _dream-knowing_ that the people inside the city were all asleep, dreaming careless dreams, and he felt a momentary disorientation wondering if they were dreaming about him dreaming about Them... and he promptly dismissed the thought when his eye fell on a third blot along the horizon. It was a lovely green place with tall trees growing out of the soil and to judge by the slight shimmer, perhaps some sort of water. Vash's stomach rumbled and clenched, squeezing in on itself and his throat felt drier than the sands around him. He was abruptly more hungry and thirsty than he had ever been in his whole life.

So Vash set out for the garden across the sandy wasteland. In that way of dreams the distance he traveled seemed interminable, every step brought him near to exhaustion and in his dream his body felt heavier than it should, like he was carrying a great invisible burden on his shoulders and the air seemed to press in on him on all sides. All the while his empty belly ached and growled at him telling him that it was hungry and he couldn't remember the last time he'd had food. It had been _so _long.

After what felt like days, perhaps weeks, he finally reached the edge of the oasis. It was strange but the oasis was too neat and orderly to be the work of Nature, the trees and plants didn't spring up willy-nilly and they were not all of different sizes either, instead the desert palms sheltering the neatly arranged underbrush were made at periodic places and all of them were the same size and shape. Wound in between the trees was a very neat and orderly path of white stone gravel, not a stone was out of place nor was there any brush or litter laying about. The water that fed the garden came from a spring that was surrounded by a neat stone fountain. The fountain was shaped of three enormous stone basins lined with neat orderly geometric mosaics of white, grey and violet decorated tile, each basin flowing neatly into the other.

The cool shade of the trees sheltered him from the sun and even the air around him smelled sweet and..._ familiar_. It was scented with a familiar scent that he _knew_ that he knew, but he couldn't quite place it. Soft and feminine, like some kind of flower, but mixed with something else. The very air of the place around him felt like a friend to him and he collapsed to his knees next to a little stream that wound in among the neat pathways and precisely places trees and started drinking the water there. It tasted sweet and wonderful on his parched throat and he drank deeply. After slaking his thirst his stomach continued to rumble, reminding him that while water was well and all, he was really _very _hungry.

A place like this _had _to have something he could eat in it.

So, Vash promptly went wandering about, deciding to follow where that neat, white gravel path might lead him. After a time he came across a walled-off section in the middle of the oasis with a little gate in the high wall made of pure white stone. Unlike all of the trees in the rest of the garden which were nice, but fruitless, Vash saw that the single tree surrounded by the wall with its little gate bore a strange fruit. It was a huge tree, stretching way up over his head, and oddly enough the fruit that was laden on every branch until they bowed under the weight of them were strange silver apples. He'd never seen a silver apple before, but in the dream in seemed to make perfect sense. Not seeing anyone around (and figuring that since it was his dream anyway) Vash expediently leaped over the gate and into the walled off section of the garden. He lost no time in shimmying up the enormous silver apple tree (which was so large around the trunk that two of him standing on either side of it couldn't have held hands... and he had long arms). When he at last scrambled up onto one of the thick lower boughs, a brilliant, gleaming silver apple hung just out of his reach, forcing him to step away from the safety of the trunk and balance himself on the branch like a balance beam. Vash had reached out to pluck a particularly fine looking fruit when he was shouted at, which made him loose his balance.

"Hey!" yelled and upset and offended voice near him. "What do you think you're doing up there!"

A very _familiar _upset and offended voice. He looked down from the branch he'd managed to grasp to keep himself from falling and saw the tiny form of his little Insurance Girl below him. She was dressed in her usual uniform but her cape was missing and her over-blouse with all of the buttons seemed a little worse for wear, there were some stains in the normally immaculate clothes and a rip here and there, and there seemed to be some buttons missing. That last was odd because she was always so fastidious about her appearance.

"Oh, hey Short Girl!" Vash greeted, trying to scrabble back up onto the limb from where he hung mostly off it.

"Don't you 'oh hey Short Girl' _me _Mister Vash!" she said sounding most cross with him and giving him the looks she always gave him when he'd given her another nights paperwork to do, or he was just generally making a nuisance of himself.

"What do you think you're doing here?" she demanded next.

"It's just that I'm really very hungry," he said pathetically as his stomach roared at him to fill it. "And there was this garden full of fruit and no-one else around so-"

Why was he explaining himself like a recalcitrant schoolboy caught outside of class to a dream construct? Did this mean that a scolding Meryl was what he got to replace Rem?

"Get down from there!" she snapped at him as he reached again for the delicious looking apple that had earlier eluded him.

"You shouldn't be here anyway. Didn't you see the wall, with the locked gate and the sign that said keep out?" Meryl demanded. "This is _my _garden and I didn't give you permission to be here. I most especially didn't say you could go about eating whatever you please, Mister Vash."

He paused, looking down at her. His stomach rumbled again. He looked back at the shiny silver apple dangling tantalizingly out of his reach.

"Well can't I?" he asked, looking pleadingly at her.

"No!" she snapped, clearly in a bad temper.

"But I'm really hungry," he said pathetically. "I haven't had anything to eat in a really, _really _long time."

She looked like she was going to climb up there and physically chase him off but she seemed to soften a little at his pleas for sustenance.

"You can't have anything in _this _garden," she grumbled, sounding reluctant but uncompromising. "This food isn't for _you_."

He got that sense in the dream that there was something _more _than was going on on the surface. He looked down at Meryl and then over at the apple, hanging so temptingly near him and reluctantly climbed down.

"Can't I have just one?" he begged as she started shooing him back toward the gate.

Meryl sighed and visibly wavered.

"I don't know if that's a good idea," she said fretfully.

Sensing weakness, Vash pressed his case.

"Aw come on, just _one _apple. What's the harm? And I'm so very hungry... pretty please?" he gave her his best sad and pathetic look, the one that had always made Rem cave and give him what he wanted, and Meryl smiled like she couldn't help it, although she still looked upset by it for some reason.

"Alright, alright, one," she said. "But no more."

In that way that dreams had, a bright, perfect silver apple appeared in the palm of her hand. Meryl looked down at it like it was the most precious thing in the world, and very very reluctantly extended her hand out to him, offering him the fruit he was starving for. He wanted to snatch at it but instead restrained himself and took it from her solemnly. Meryl eyes, oddly enough, didn't leave the apple, she was clearly very worried about giving it to him.

To reassure her Vash sank his teeth into the delicate flesh of the apple and taste exploded on his tongue. It was the most delicious thing he'd ever tasted! When he swallowed he felt a wonderful peaceful sense of well-being envelop him. All of his worries seemed to fade into the distance, all of the physical discomfort he felt dimmed to nothing. Feeling abruptly restful, Vash lay out under the tree, cradled in the roots, and stared up at the dappled sunlight shining through the branches and the wind sighing softly around him. Vash continued to eat at the apple and even though it was relatively small, in the dream, he felt full. The apple didn't even really taste like an apple, he realized a moment later. The apple tasted like, well it tasted like _Meryl_, (not that he actually _knew _what she tasted like, but if he were going to imagine what she tasted like then she'd have tasted like the apple).

"It's good," he said encouragingly, taking another bite.

He really was ravenous. It had been so long since he'd eaten.

"Of course," Meryl replied. "It's my garden."

His dreaming-self realized that there was something unusual going on, he knew in that dreaming way that he wasn't actually supposed to be in the garden. He was an intruder there. Just as he knew that his hunger and his eating the reluctantly offered apple meant more than it seemed on the surface.

"You look really tired," she commented.

"I feel like I've lost my way, and I'm worried about you," Vash said feeling a little bit sad, despite the fact that the fruit seemed to be having some kind of weird calming feeling on him.

"You don't need to worry about me, I'm fine," Meryl replied firmly.

Then she seemed to look at him oddly like she was almost looking through him, or _into _him.

"You should worry more about yourself," she added, half-chidingly. "You're all tangled up, fighting with yourself. You'll never heal fully unless you accept him."

"Who?" Vash asked.

Meryl pointed to another person who had appeared mysteriously on the other side of the tree. He wore a red coat just like Vash used to, with red-tinted black wings sprouting from his back and eyes that glowed malevolent red even in the daylight. On instinct Vash moved between Meryl in order to protect her from him, but Meryl shook her head at him.

"He won't hurt me," She said confidently. "And besides, this is my place; he_ can't_ hurt me here. I'll leave you two boys alone to talk."

Vash stared at his doppleganger who seemed to be eyeing the fruit hanging high above their heads with a speculative look.

"Stay out of those," Vash warned him, even though he'd done the same thing at first. "Meryl doesn't like people helping themselves."

"It's not like she's _using _them," Crimson replied. "She won't notice if I just take one or two."

"You should ask permission first," Vash replied.

Crimson Diablo shrugged and turned to face him.

"That's half our problem right there," he said scornfully. "You're too timid. If I were in charge of things we wouldn't be in nearly the same mess we are now. For one thing..." Crimson eyed Meryl's slender, petite form sitting on a small swing hung from a nearby tree.

"Meryl wouldn't be technically considered single, because I'd have made her all mine _long _before now. You're too afraid to go after what you want."

"I am not!" Vash snapped, irritated.

"Oh yeah?" Crimson said, hopping up slightly and snatching an apple hanging from a bough above him. He presented it to Vash with a smug little smirk on his face. "Prove it."

"I have nothing to prove," Vash muttered, crossing his arms and refusing to take the apple.

"And now we come to the other part of our little problem,"Crimson jeered, tossing the silver apple from hand to hand absently. "Keep holding back against him, and Knives is just going to kick our collective ass again. The stakes are higher now, and you and I both know it. Besides that; 'way I see it, he _more _than has it coming. The nerve of him, stealing her away from us."

Crimson was still eyeing Meryl where she was sitting calmly in the little garden and staring out at nothing, apparently just letting her mind wander. Crimson looked at her like he'd have liked to devour her right on the spot. But underneath the blatant desire for her was a terrible, sad longing and loneliness that Vash quickly averted his eyes from. It was unnerving to see emotions he went to such great lengths to hide standing out naked on his own face as easily as in a mirror.

"You're really fixated on this aren't you?" Vash said to the other Vash. "And how crazy am I, talking with myself?"

"There's a few other little points I want to iron out while you're listening to me for a change," Crimson said, tossing the apple up in the air and catching it absently.

Vash's stomach rumbled again.

"There is a grain of truth in what Knives says about people consuming the plants, but I'm equally sure that he's not seeing the whole picture. People created the plant Angels as a power source to act as the core of the ships and take them across the stars, but don't you get the feeling from time to time that... well that _They _need people too? Look what happened to our sisters in the towns that Knives cleared out."

There were reports sent back from teams sent out by other cities to recover the angels and their bulbs to be added on as auxiliary power to nearby towns that reported that when they had reached the abandoned towns, the bulbs were blank and inoperative. Vash had been mystified as to how that could be; like Knives, he had expected the opposite effect, that without peoples constant draining them of their energy supply that their readings would go up, but it seemed that that wasn't the case. The angels in the abandoned towns seemed to have simply shut themselves down.

"We know from the Seed in our own arms.. or rather, _arm_, that our kin act as some kind of gateway to channel energy from some _other _place into this one through their bodies. So _that_ leaves the question of where are they getting that energy?"

"Good question," Vash mumbled.

"And point the third," Crimson went on. "Why the hell are we wasting time going after that damned keystone instead of going in and laying the smackdown on that asshole for taking Meryl away? Give me one good reason!"

"Um, if we don't he'll hurt Meryl."

"Dammit you idiot, he's already hurt her! He cut off her finger! Doesn't that piss you off?"

Vash tried for one of his careless grins and his doppleganger just glared at him, and with those red eyes the glare looked twice as scary as normal. Vash got the message; he hadn't a prayer in the world of fooling himself.

"Of course it makes me angry," Vash said quietly with a perfectly even tone to his voice. "But getting angry doesn't solve anything and violence and revenge just breed more of the same."

"Breed more of the same? Um, where the hell have you been that you hadn't noticed that he's going after you? He doesn't need you to hit him first in order to be violent."

"He's still my brother," Vash argued stubbornly.

"That doesn't excuse what he's done and what he continues to do," Crimson countered swiftly.

"He's hurting inside," Vash pleaded. "I don't want to hurt him even more."

"He has no such a quandary about you."

"Everything he's done and does, he does because he loves me. Granted, it's a scary _twisted _sort of love, but he loves me as much as he ever has. I don't want to hurt him."

"You've spared him and forgiven him time after time. Christ man, **GOD** himself doesn't have as much patience as you do! At least the Big Man wasn't shy about laying in some old testament smackdown every now and then. Raining brimstone, pillars of salt... How 'bout a little of _that_?"

"Well, I don't know whether you'd noticed or not, but I'm not god," Vash snapped.

His inner self was really annoying. Even more so when he had a point.

"There's another reason why we should change course and go after our brother instead of wasting time on this stupid side-quest. Even if he didn't have Meryl, all he'd have to do is threaten a town full of innocents and you will happily sit up and bark like a dog to appease him, just roll over and show him our belly."

"Well what the hell am I supposed to do then?" Vash demanded.

"Take the fight to him," Crimson answered promptly. "If you give him enough grief, like he's been giving you for instance, then he's going to have to concentrate all of his resources on you."

"But he already knows that the best way to hurt me is to hurt others."

It was the worlds most unfair catch-twenty-two.

"That was the reason why I acted as bait to draw him out for all those years," Vash added in a reminding manner to his other self.

"Ambush him, one large preemptive strike. Take him out."

"I'm not going to kill him."

"Yeah well, I don't think we can, not without doing irreparable harm," Crimson agreed, sounding put out about it.

Why the hell did his inner voice sound so much like Wolfwood? Maybe that was another reason why he and Wolfwood had been such fast friends, deep down Vash had secretly agreed with him on a few points.

"But there is something we can do," Crimson added. "Hit him where it really hurts; in his plans. You know that plotting schemer has to have a back-up plan, and probably more than one, but he can't do it alone, much as I'm sure it irks him. We've seen already with that carrion guy that he's got a back-up team of henchmen. We should go after them, wring the information we want out of them and then go after whatever it is that Knives finds so damned important. Strike the most important part of things, strike hard and strike fast before he sees it coming, and if we disrupt his plans enough he'll be the one playing catch-up for a change."

"Um, still one major problem with your little plan. He's got a hostage. If we hit him, he'll hit _her_. Only in Knive's case I don't think he'd settle for knocking her around."

Even in his dreams Vash's body automatically tightened with a fierce protective anger at the thought of anyone, no matter how close he was to Vash, offering Meryl any harm at all.

"And just as an irrelevant side-point," Crimson grinned. "That Jessica chick fully has the hots for us. We could _so _nail her."

Vash made a disgusted sound and rolled his eyes.

"You're so repressed," Crimson muttered. "If it had been left up to me we wouldn't have returned to a cold and empty bed when we got back home. There'd have been a beautiful, little firecracker warming it for us. Or with us, which would be even better."

"I can't believe I'm hearing this," Vash muttered.

"It's not much of a consolation prize, but stalker-girl would be happy to keep us company."

"I thought your thing was for Meryl," Vash countered to his alternate self (partly because he was desperate to change the subject; sleeping with Jessica would be like incest) who kept looking over at her all through their conversation. Of course to be honest, so did he.

"Meryl is... Meryl is different," Crimson said, naked _need _on his face.

The feeling there was so vulnerable it was hard to look at, even for Vash.

"I'd give almost anything to be with her, wouldn't you?"

"Yes," Vash agreed quietly.

"Well then it seems we finally agree on something then," Crimson said. "And just so you know, I'm not going to hold back anymore. When we get her back, that is. She's going to know how we feel about her, and the sooner the better."

Vash reluctantly acknowledged his counterpart's will in the matter. No point in trying to struggle against it after all. He was beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, he deserved something better than a long life of continuing sacrifice and self denial.

"Are you still going to pursue that useless quest for the holy grail or whatever?" Crimson asked.

"I think it's necessary, and not just to get Meryl back. I'm pretty sure there's more going on than we think."

"Just do me a favor and stop holding back so much, it makes your enemies think that we're weak. Give 'em a show of strength-"

"And they'll just turn even more pernicious," Vash finished for him. "No, I think that I'll keep on doing things my way."

"But is it really your way?" Crimson questioned. "I thought you said you we're going to find your _own _way from now on, instead you're falling right back into the same habits you've always done. Acting like a fool so people underestimate you, trying to save everyone and fight everyone else's battles for them, pulling away from all your real attachments because you don't want to get hurt, letting your brother do whatever the hell he wants without even _trying _to put any checks on him... Face it, we're getting no-where. The old methods don't work now, if they ever did. All it's doing now is making us weak and predictable and easily manipulated. Do you think Knives would have had the gall to order that asshole to take one of our Insurance Girls away from us by force unless he knew exactly what to say and do to get away with it?"

"I get it, it's my fault she's gone," Vash whispered to himself feeling so low he wanted to crawl into a hole in the ground.

Crimson buffeted him with a wing. Hard.

"And dammit! Stop doing that! You know it's Knives' fault and you insist on blaming yourself. No-wonder we're still missing an arm!"

"Huh?" Vash asked.

"Geeze, don't you _get _it? All those scars, the grate, the holes, the prosthetic arm? They're all still there because you won't let them heal any more than you have to. Back in July we literally blew Knives a new ass-hole, and considerably more than that, but a few decades later he comes out of his healing sleep and there's not a single mark on him. He certainly doesn't seem to believe he needs to suffer and wear visible marks of all his failings on his body like some kind of scarlet letter, so he doesn't. You're limiting our effectiveness. Now finish your apple, Meryl's given you a great gift."

Crimson tossed the apple he'd plucked for himself up in the air and caught it, looking at it speculatively.

"As for me..."

"Put that back, or at least go ask her for it," Vash snapped back.

But Crimson was apparently a doer not a thinker for he grinned a quick devilish grin and took a great deep bite and tossed the apple at Vash who caught it on reflex. When he looked back down, between one blink and the next, Crimson was gone.

Even though he was feeling full of wellness and perfectly contented Vash felt oddly still very very hungry, his stomach still growled at him. Surely she wouldn't miss one more. After all it was only one little apple and granted it might be rude to eat something with out asking but really what was the harm? And that instinct that one gets in dreams, where one can _tell _that things are about to turn dark but one is pulled along by the force of the dream to see what happens, Vash picked up the apple and tasted the juice droplet running down one side of the skin. The sweet nectar of the apple dribbled down his throat and tasted as divine as the first one had, but nearby, Meryl gasped and clenched her fist to her chest.

"Vash..." she said looking in dismay at the apple in his hand with a bite missing from it. "Vash what have you done?"

Guiltily he offered the apple back to her.

"Spit it out," she commanded urgently.

He couldn't help but feel confused by her request but he could sense her panic.

"Spit it out!" she repeated sounding truly afraid.

Still confused and feeling guilty Vash reluctantly spat the bit of apple out onto the grass and there to his amazement a little sapling grew right before his eyes and twined up around the trunk of the larger apple tree. In the dream it seemed to make _sense _that they would be growing together. The dream Meryl, however, looked very upset about the new addition to her garden.

"That's not supposed to be here," she fretted.

Vash didn't understand why she was so nervous, it seemed perfectly fine to him. In fact he was happy to see the little seedling take root there and in that mysterious way of dreams he was happy about it without knowing _why _he was happy about it.

"What have you done?" she whispered again, sounding lost and afraid.

And on that strangely unsettling note Vash woke up. He glanced over at the clock built into the head of the bed on the ship and noted that it was only three a.m. He sighed out a deep breath, feeling troubled and upset by the dream without knowing why. Maybe it was all of the worries he had in the waking world following him into sleep.

Great. Now he was wide awake. He just knew he wasn't going to be getting back to sleep anytime soon.

Meryl was out there somewhere, perhaps Knives had locked her underground where there was no sunlight, maybe she was chained up, Vash had no way of knowing short of trying to contact his twin telepathically through their link and the link had to be open on both ends. Knives hadn't left his end open for communications in decades. It hadn't been like that when they'd been children, each of them had known the thoughts of the other as naturally as a person would know where their right hand was. Not anymore though.

Vash shook his head again, trying to banish the unsettling imagery of the dream and the disturbed feeling that it left him with. Meryl was alive and relatively okay, she just _had _to be. Vash bit softly at his lip and started in surprise when he tasted something sweet on it. He licked it carefully, mystified as to how that could be because he hadn't eaten anything sweet before he'd just collapsed into his bunk, weary and heart-heavy. Abruptly the image of him biting into the apple in the dream came back to him as vividly as if he'd actually lived it.

He sat up in bed and rubbed his hands over his face... then abruptly jerked them away from him in shock. His right arm, his _real _arm, was... Vash looked all up and down the length of it looking for the seams, the healed over rips and rents in the fabric of his skin, that he had accumulated over the years and at first he couldn't find any. They were always a little bit lumped, raised slightly out from the regular texture of his skin, and _very _noticeable, but now they were smooth and only very faintly white. His arm looked almost _normal_. Vash felt the energy in his blood quicken as he ever so carefully reached his hand to the hem of his sleeping shirt and pulled gingerly upwards. The great scars that crisscrossed his stomach and upper torso were... _lesser_. Normally it took him hours of stretching in the morning to keep his scar-seamed skin supple so that he would not loose any mobility in his body. Granted, all the major scars were still there, the bolt near his waist, the grate over the spot where a heart on a human being would be, the arm that his brother had shot off. But those too were lesser.

His body was... regenerating?

Excitement and elation washed through him in a wave, just as that feeling of wellness and peace and comfort had in the dream after he'd bitten into the apple. He was healing! It was strange to think that a dream might have something to do with it, but Vash was almost certain deep down that something more than simple dreaming had taken place.

He experimentally ran a hand over the flesh of his torso, prodding and rubbing at the skin there to feel with his own hands whether or not the difference was as much as it looked from the outside. The skin flowed and flexed with a smooth suppleness that hadn't been there in a long time. It _felt _smoother too, no longer were the white scars lumped and ridged, like badly soldered seams of metal, but they now felt more like real skin! The flesh around the piece of metal didn't ache as much as they had by the hard, cold alien presence embedding itself in the place of soft muscle and bone. When he moved there weren't a million tiny little aches and pains, no feeling of skin stiffly stretching to accommodate him after a night of going lax without movement. There was nothing but the feel of his body, without aches, without pain.

An unexpected miracle.

* * *

**Let's hear it for symbolic dreams! Actually, that scene with the tree and the silver apples came to me in a dream strangely enough. I'd intended for Vash to have a talk with Crimson Diablo, and to somehow deepen his connection with Meryl, but I hadn't worked out quite how to do so at that point, then one night I had that neat apple eating analogy and decided I'd try it. When I wrote it out it turned out quite well I felt, so I kept it in instead of deleting it. Now I can't imagine the story without it. I hoped you all liked it, please read and reveiw.**


	41. Yenta: Career Path for the Sisterhood

Legato was nearly as relieved as his thralls had been when the storm at last lifted and they could get out of the tightly packed confines of the land-transport. He would never have admitted it, but keeping a tight reign over a large group of hot-blooded young men who were inclined to fight one another out of boredom and a desire to test their own and each others strengths when forcibly crowded together in confines with little space was more difficult than keeping control of them out in the field. He'd managed, but it had taxed his skills rather more than he'd been expecting. He could only assume that the reason was that he'd only taken control of her new body but recently and was still getting to know the layout of his new shell.

Speaking of his new vessel, Legato Bluesummers was begining to suspect strongly that the mostly-dead body he'd Jumped into when the Master's brother had done as the master had said he must and pulled the trigger wasn't as empty of its previous inhabitant as Legato had at first surmised. He had given the body more than enough time to vacate itself after he'd forced the mans uncle to prepare the way for Legato... i.e. to "do the deed," he should not be sensing interference. And yet, it had happened last night... when Legato's defenses had been down in sleep, he'd felt a presence poking around in his mind, probing his defenses, looking at his plans and his memories. A _familiar _presence. It seemed that his unwilling host was more pernicious than Legato had given him credit for.

He sighed a bit to himself, debating whether or not he should take the time out from his busy schedule to root out the alternate presence and banish it for good or just table it for later; it would take his full concentration after all and he had his thralls to remain in control of...

:_Later_,: he decided shortly.

After all, it wasn't as if the host's mind-presence had even a fraction of the power that _he _could wield. There was simply no way, no matter how weak Legato got, that the host-mind would have to power and ability to push him out anyway. All he would be was aminor irritation until Legato found the time to get rid of the last few traces of him permanently. It could wait for now, he had other matters to attend to.

:_Fan out and search for any traces of them_,: he ordered his thralls. :_In order to survive they would to have had to have holed up somewhere, and with any luck they'll think themselves now safe enough from pursuit to have a rest. We may catch them off-guard_.:

He heard mental grumbles from his thralls and no few of them strained at the mental leash he'd put on them but in the end he had them firmly in hand (or whatever) and they marched out in a search pattern as he had ordered them to. With any luck, this would be the day.

* * *

In order to spare her probably fragile pride Vash was trying hard not to laugh. He thanked heavens that he had so much experience in masking his thoughts to draw upon, otherwise she would surely have noticed that his sudden coughing fit sounded suspiciously like choked-back mirth. She had been a _dear _child really, and he didn't want to hurt he feelings...

"Can I get you more donuts?" she asked, her tone breathy.

Vash tried not to be obvious when he edged away as she leaned over at him, incidentally revealing a perfect veiw of her not entiely inconsiderable cleavage... he was sure it wasn't by accident either.

"I... um, I'm good," he said inching backwards in his chair.

Gone was the space-jumper suit that the population that had remained on the floating sky city still wore and how he missed it so. Instead, Jessica had seemingly decided to "fit in" by wearing local clothes, in a most provocative manner. She had a sleeveless button-down shirt, but the top three buttons were undone, as well as most of the bottom ones so she could tie it off in a midriff-baring manner. There was no tank-top underneath it. Jeans, which _should _have covered all or most of her legs, were cut off just barely on the sunny side of decency.

Had they been anywhere but out in the middle of no-where Vash could have refused to let her out in public dressed like that and demanded that she go change into something else, but that excuse wouldn't fly when there was no-one but them around to notice, and he had the feeling that she wanted him to comment on her clothes in the first place, instead he ignored them and acted like there was nothing out of the ordinary. She seemed a little put-out by this, which Vash took to mean that he wasn't playing into her hands. So much the better.

"Are you sure you don't want some more juice?" she pressed, actually batting her eyes at him.

"I'm not thirsty," he replied, looking back down at his plate.

He had the feeling she might actually try to "accidentally" spill some on his lap so she could wipe it up.

It was more than a little weird to see someone whom he'd given ice cream to as a little girl and soothed her tears when she'd skinned a knee skulking about him like a hardened seductress. He'd seen aspects of the process several times over the years; kids he'd played with in the streets grow older, grow up, get married, had kids of their own while he remained unchanged... but none of those children before had become fixated on _him _personally. They'd always moved on with their own lives while he got one with his, it had been both a relief and a sorrow for him. On the one hand it meant that he forever lived on the outside looking in, but on the other hand the loose connection made the solitude not quite so bad, it would have been harder to bear the hurt if he'd _really _let them into his heart. Jessica seemed determined to become the future Missus Vash the Stampede and it was... _weird_.

:_I have other things to concentrate on right now anyway_,: he thought, relieved to take his mind off the somewhat creepy behavior displayed (literally) recently by someone he tended to think of more as a little sister figure.

They had arrived recently at the next destination that the keystone led them to. The Doc said that he thought that the locations of these places might perhaps be related somehow, he was doing some work with the data he'd collected and a holo of the satellite maps from the ships data base right then. Milly was a welcome buffer between Vamp-princess Jessica and her reluctant prey right then, chattering on as though she hadn't noticed a thing when Vash was dead certain she wasn't oblivious to it. It saved him from having to confront Jessica about it and he was relived to have a slight reprieve. Vash was already so frazzled with everything else going on in his life he didn't want to have to deal with an emotional confrontation with a girl who clearly held him in such high esteem.

:_It's going to have to happen sooner or later old boy_,: he counseled himself.

If he really wanted to be kind to her he'd make it sooner rather than later, make the break quick if not clean. However, Jessica had no real sense of self-control or responsibility; she was a sweet enough girl, but just a little bit spoiled and cossetted (she'd been the darling baby on the ship) if Vash rejected her as plainly as it would take to pull her off from him she might just decide to "make him sorry" and go run off into the desert in a fit of temper. She'd probably return in a day or two, cooled off and ready to go home, provided she made it back at all. For one thing, having grown up sheltered on the ship she had no real idea what dangers existed out there, she could end up in the cargo hold of a slaver transport, or food for a grendel, or even poisoned by Barevi thorns because she wouldn't know what to look out for. Vash didn't have the time to seek her out or worry about her. He already had someone he was worried about. As soon as he found the last of those Keystones he was sending Jessica home. He'd come clean with her then, when she could (callus as it sounded) take her temper out on someone else. He still had Knives to worry about.

:_Speaking of Knives, odd that he hasn't sent out one of his henchmen to harrow at my heels_,: Vash thought suspiciously.

That actually made him feel worse instead of better though. Vash didn't know what Knives was up to, and the lack of contact, while easing up on his physical well-being (because he didn't have to fight battle after difficult battle), wasn't helping his mental well-being out any. Maybe Knives just didn't have the personel to spare, or maybe he was planning something really mean. Vash coudn't know.

:_And that worries me_,: he admitted.

He sighed a little with worry, and scratched a vague itch on the back of her head. That Knives was up to something couldn't be doubted, and given the stakes this time Vash was even more worried than usual.

:_The last few times we've tangled, it's just been mostly him and me. Sure, there was always the background danger that if I was ever truly beaten, Knives would go on to destroy the Human Race, but at times it almost never seemed real. I mean, how would someone destroy every last man woman and child in this place_?:

Well, the obvious answer was Knives real goal anyway, take away their access to the Plants. Humanity depended on them to make life even the tiniest bit feasible on this dustball, Knives wasn't entirely far off in that particular gripe. But still, it seemed like such a huge, strange and impossible goal, killing off humanity.

:_But now it's not just Humanity he seems to be after_,: Vash thought with a deepening feeling of worry.

He had to know, somehow, about the Gaea Device.

:_He wouldn't be having me seek out the peices of the keystone otherwise_,: Vash thought logically to himself. :_He must plan on using it somehow. And knowing him, his purposes in doing so probably are not benign toward any but his own chosen people.:_

Vash knew more about the workings of the device due to his exposure to the keystone puzzles, but even _he _had only the vaguest notion of how the Device worked. He didn't know what powered it, he didn't know how it activated, he wasn't all that certain who made it, and he didn't know for certain what role the keystone he was gathering was supposed to play.

Vash rose to his feet and signaled subtly that he was going out.

"Stay here with the ship, Jessica," the Doc ordered firmly.

"But-!" she protested immediately.

"Please, do as he says," Vash seconded.

"But Milly-!" she tried again.

"Is going to be excersizing the tomases," she said cheerfully. "Mister Vash and Mister Doc will probably take a while to do whatever it is they're doing, so if you don't mind I thought I'd stay behind this trip since I don't think I'm going to be able to help much with the keystone. Ihope you don't mind, but I could sure use the company."

Stymied, Jessica sat back in her chair, crossed her arms under her breasts and grumbled and grudging acceptance. Vash and doc headed out the door, the short distance to the place.

...

_**((Soundtrack: Hymn of the Fayth. Final Fantasy 10))**_

It had taken an entire night and a day and the rest of the night following to reach this place which was so far off from the beaten path that Vash thought they might possibly be the first to lay eyes on it since the original survey team, minus the person who had made the keystone. The place they had arrived at was a barren wasteland, but really what places were not on this world? The covering was not the softer finely ground sand of the dunes but rather a variable mixture of grains ranging from dust-fine to pebbles and small rocks all coating in a thin veneer over a hard stone surface that still showed through in some places, rocks and formations up-jutting from the gravel at odd places. Directly in front of them, the direction that the keystone indicated, was the largest terrain feature for many miles around. Instead of being an indistinct tumble of rough boulders or a partially eroded volcanic neck, it was a great conical-shaped feature of solid rock, bug enough to be declared a mountain. It stood out very plainly in such open, empty surroundings. The beam of light shone strongly at a black triangular crevice at the base.

"Looks like the place," Alfie remarked. vash nodded and the both walked into the cooler shade of the crevice.

They didn't have far to walk before they came to a seemingly ordinary stone face at the rear of the cave. The keystone-compass' light shone on it and the pattern of lines and circles and spirals and symbols that was beginning to become very familiar to Vash inscribed themselves in a hazy light on the surface.

"What does it say?" the doc asked, taking it to be some kind of script he couldn't decipher.

Vash looked carefully at the grid, mentally untangling the various symbols for energy flow, addition and subtraction of energy demands, symbols for elements and the recombination of molecules and the various protocols and sub-protocols of the grid itself and at last said

"Nothing."

"Huh? It doesn't want you to-?"

Vash held up the keystone and the pendant and the light bled along the wall into a rough doorway shape which the rock faded away from.

"Come on," he said.

Without another word, Vash stepped through the arch, and stopped dead. His eyes widened as he took in his surroundings.

It was like a great stone cathedral, someone had hollowed out the entire inside of the mountain. Like all of the greatest cathedrals there was that feeling of greatness to just a vast enclosed space; a silence and tranquility. It was... hallowed. Light streamed down from sunlights in the ceiling, sparkling with golden motes here and there where the light caught on dust. The stone floor at his feet was mosaic, with a sparkling light, like powdered diamonds in the now-familiar interweaving spirals and circles of the grid. The patterns was so intricate that even Vash's heightened vision could not follow a single flow in the overall web.

"Do you hear that?" The doc asked in a whisper.

It wasn't necessary that he whisper, but it seemed appropriate.

Oh, yes, he heard it alright.

"They're... singing?"

It was a slow hymn, the words indistinguishable against the echo of the stone, but it sounded... it was the most beautiful thing Vash had ever heard. The sound was so sad, so wistful, yet so full of hope and yearning, devotion and wonderful tranquility, the moment of perfect beauty, he felt all the will to fight or move drain out of him. It was like drifting off into a wonderful peaceful sleep, falling under the thrall of that song.

"...It sounds... familiar," Vash breathed.

He was unable to move, not like he was frozen in place, but because he was so relaxed and felt so peaceful that he didn't want to move. He just wanted to go on listening to that song forever. That thought triggered where he found the song so familar, where he had "heard" it before. He hadn't heard it with his _physical _senses, but his mind and body had brushed along side it in resonance when he communicated with his sisters. It was thier song, the Song of Being.

With an effort of will, Vash brought himself back around and nudged the Doc, who had fallen deeply entranced by the sound.

"You should go wait outside," Vash said. "Otherwise you'll get sucked in again and I'll have to carry you out."

The Doc looked reluctant, but after he caught himself drifting off again a short moment after his attention wandered he had to accede that Vash was right and exited the chamber. Vash continued across the round cathedral-like opening, noting as he went along that the walls were not rough stone but had been smoothed out to a polish and there was another archway in the back, sealed with a glowing force-wall that had a single glowing picture in it, a picture of the keystone in its current state, like a pyramid with a quarter-section missing from it.

"No more puzzles?" he questioned, wondering at his good luck as he held up the keystone.

His senses were buzzing a little in that way he got when he spent any amount of time near his bulb-kin.

The force-wall dissipated like smoke and Vash stepped through the archway into another room.

It was a chamber filled with soft blue-white light. There was a great circular stone pool in the middle with the water precisely even with the rim of the stone. The water looked silvery, like liquid quicksilver, but it glowed softly, as though lit from within. Above the great stone pool, hovering in midair as if gravity were not a factor was a massive glowing white crystal. It had two enormous spars from the top and bottom, slightly smaller spars jutted out in a circle around the middle and smaller spars grew haphazardly from out of those in a massive glowing stone starburst, turning lazily in the air like a window crystal dangling on the end of a string. Vash recognized the stone, it was the same kind of stone that Meryl's pendant was made of. But that wasn't what caused his breath to catch in his throat in surprise.

In a perfectly spaced circle along the smooth, white stone walls of the chamber, twelve great pillars of crystal glowed far more brightly than the crystal starburst hanging in the air over the glassy-calm pool in the center of the room that cast water-ripple light-shadows on the ceiling. Inside the smooth crystal of these clear, glowing pillars floated identical humanoid forms. They were vaguely feminine in form but with a definite element of the inhuman about them, their faces were too elongated and smooth, too symmetrical, too sculpturally perfect to be really human. They were lacking the various flaws, imperfections and character that made a face _human_. And their eyes glowed a soft blue-white. Their bodies also glowed softly, as though they had swallowed one of the moons and it glowed out from under their skin. Their wings were strange affairs that managed to give of an impression of flesh and feathers. The song eminated from them.

"Now what?" he asked outloud.

This wasn't like any of the previous trials he'd gone through to get hold of a peice of the keystone, there he had just completed the task set to him, walked in and gotten his prize.

An unseen mental force, gentle invisible, but definitely there nudged him forward towards the pool at his feet. He hesitated, uncertain of what was being asked of him, and a second little mental command came, more firm than the first. He was to enter the spring. Vash, not seeing the sense in getting his clothes wet, pulled off his boots and stripped down. The starburst crystal was far enough over his head that even his height wouldn't bump into it. He cautiously stepped into the water... which now that he looked at it didn't look like water at all, it looked like someone had taken liquid quicksilver and poured it into the pool, if liquid quicksilver could manage to glow silvery-white like moonlight that was. When Vash's feet touched it, the strange liquid felt icy-hot on his skin, not unpleasant but certainly strange. Vash walked out all the way into the little underground lake, until he stood directly under the glowing starburst crystal, the "water" or whatever it was, came up to his waist.

The song enveloped him, wrapping him up in warm, peaceful tranquility, making him open and receptive. Vash got a feeling of the usual mingled consciousnesses of the Plants nearby with the hymn-like song a steady, soothing noise in the background. The twelve presences here with him were a part of and yet separate (for now) from that _greater _consciousness, they were there to "speak" with him... though with Plant Angels, "speak" was a _relative _term. They didn't use words to communicate, theirs was a language of the heart. The imprescision of it though, often made it difficult for Vash, accustomed as he was to framing concepts and ideas with words, to understand what they were trying to communicate to him.

He sensed puzzlement from them. A vague feeling of expectation, like a host holding the door open for another guest, but that guest wasn't there.

"I'm alone," Vash said out loud. "We're you expecting someone else?"

Assent. It felt like his entire being nodded.

"There are people with me waiting outside, is that who you mean?" He pictured each of them in his mind, but they read the "sense" of them, their psychic imprint on him, from his heart.

Again negation, and a stronger feeling of puzzlement. Someone _should _be here. They couldn't seem to grasp why that person was not.

"Who do you mean?" Vash asked, floating on his back lazily, looking up at the great glowing crystal that pulsed ever so slightly, like a slow heartbeat, in time with the hymn.

The Angels couldn't answer him in a way he could understand. They couldn't use pictures because, due to them having lived inside a bulb all of their lives, they lacked the necessary frame of reference to form them, and their thoughts were disjointed with a dreamlike feeling of unreality to them. It was difficult to understand those who lived outside of time. One "perked up" however when it caught the soft buzz of resonance from Meryl's necklace. Vash received a very emphatic image of that necklace and a feeling of urgent question.

"Necklace?" he guessed.

The reply was an even more emphatic questioning. Vash sighed a bit and closed his eyes, picturing Very clearly Meryl Stryfe in his mind. She was as he always saw her, pristine white uniform primply buttoned up to the throat, fitted office skirt, thick tights for feild work, white half-boots, the very image of capable propriety in a woman, dark hair slightly mussed from the wind, soft pale white skin, beautiful expressive grey eyes...

He got the feeling of a sigh from them with a slight feeling of frustration... this wasn't helping them at all! Vash finally got it. It wasn't enough to simply picture what she looked like in his mind, they wouldn't know who or what the hell they were supposed to be looking at. If he wanted them to be able to understand the concept "Meryl Stryfe" he would have to communicate who she was through his heart. It was the only way they would understand.

...hoo boy.

Vash took a deep breath. He did not want to do this. His feelings for Meryl were something he considered private, he had just barely started to admit them to himself and he didn't think he was ready for the big step of admitting them to someone else. They might or might not understand it, but he was pretty sure that what one Angel knew they _all _knew, and he was just as certain that Knives had a way to tap into their consciousness and share in their communication. Despite the fact that when they had been children, such communication had been second nature to them, Vash didn't want his brother to know what was in his heart.

:_But who are they going to tell anyway? Knives probably already knows or has guessed_,: Vash thought. :_Alright_...:

He very carefully painted in that image in his mind with memories of their time together; the time she'd shouted him down for goofing off, the times she'd stood by him and helped him, her voice, her rare smiles... His heart did that fluttery thing it always did when he allowed himself the rare luxury of really thinking about her, and his soul filled up with that wonderful feeling of completeness and happiness that he only got when he was with her.

After a moment Vash received a pleased feeling of assent, and another 'questing' feeling. They were "looking" for her, expecting that she was with him. Vash's heart plummeted to the region of his toes. He shared with them his hearts memories of what had taken place, a soul-impression of Knives growing angry and storming off, a soul impression of Meryl accompanied by fear and resistance as she was taken away from him, and Vash's sorrow at being bereft. His determination to find her again, and a mental image of the keystone.

There was a sudden sinking feeling in his stomach, like the entire world had dropped out from under him, along with a creeping feeling of dismay. And it wasn't his own. It was a Plant's mental equivalent of "uh-oh..."

"What's wrong?" he asked, suddenly nervous.

He "saw" Meryls pendant (though in actuality it was more like the "feeling" of Meryl's pendant) and the keystone. He saw a lake much like this one underground and Meryl (communicated through soul-sight) walking out to the middle of the lake to receive her destiny as she had been Called to do. Power wrapped around her, waking a slumbering power that had slept dormant throughout her life. Then Vash got another image of the keystone, a complete version this time, a full octahedron (like two pyramids with the bases glued together) of obsidian-dark stone that had a silvery-grey smokey light weaving over the surface of it held in Meryl's hands. He got a feeling of a task completed... but then Meryl disappeared and the keystone shattered and Vash received a strong feeling of negation.

"I'm not sure I follow you..." Vash said. "Are you saying that there's something unusual about her?"

Assent. Assent and a feeling of motherly/sisterly protectiveness, the kind of protectiveness that comes from having nurtured something along. He got a soul-image of Meryl's father and it was a difficult thing to see. Some horrible event somewhere had ravaged the mans soul to web of sorrow so deep it was near to madness; a creeping despair that had once sucked out every breath of life, but an eventual surcease of sorrow in his duty to the Sisterhood and their task for him. Vash looked at the soul-image of a different man, a man he had never met, but he got the sense from the Angels that they had brought him under their wing, and that he was a legacy from someone else they had taken an interest in. Vash got the feeling of interminable time passing by outside as he watched and waited, years blowing around him like dust as he kept a close watch on one particular area of interest. And back back back for unimportant generations as Those Who Lived Outside Of Time reckoned things.

Vash took a minute to absorb the implications, shocked.

"You... you've all been manipulating not just her, but her whole _family _for generations?" Vash gasped out.

He felt the Angelic equivalent of an indifferent shrug of assent. _Their _kind were not thick upon the ground, and how else were the Angels to fulfill their duty? It was taking longer than they had wanted, but the end was in sight. They'd had to work slowly and carefully, managing what meagre resources they could scrape together, but at long last they had managed to move the correct pieces into place. Soon they could rest.

"Did you send her to me?" he demanded, starting to feel more than a little irked.

Vash received a feeling of a choice... it had been either him or Knives. They'd chosen him. He was more likely to complete their goals in the manner they desired than the other little brother was.

"Oh nice," he muttered, his pride pricked.

And now Knives had her. Vash sensed a feeling of irritation not just at him but the situation in general. It was not possible for Those Who Lived Outside of Time to grasp the concept of impatience, for them time was meaningless, but he did catch a definite feeling of weariness and wishing it all to be done with already.

"I see," Vash said with empathic sympathy. "You're all just tired."

He'd caught the same feeling from the plant he'd visited in May City, the constant demand of supporting the human population was _wearing _on them, there might soon come a day where the threshold was reached.

"You were hoping to have the Gaea Device finished within the generation, so that's why you sent her to me. You thought I could watch out for her and keep her safe for you until you were ready..."

Vash honestly had very mixed feelings about that. On one hand, he could understand that his siblings were probably as tired as Atlas, carrying the world on their shoulders, but on the other hand...

He sent a mental-sense of the continuing conflict between him and his brother, and Knives' bitter acrimony about the outcome of the last battle, and lastly, reluctantly he shared with his siblings the horror he had felt when he had received Knives' "gift" of her severed finger.

They did not understand. Pain was an unknown to them, they had lived their entire lives safe and protected from everything inside those containment spheres. They had never had even the most minor of physical injuries. They understood the abstract, pain was bad, bringing other people pain was bad, their little brother is often in pain... but they just didn't _understand _it. Vash tried to simplify it.

Knives had removed a piece of her physical body from her by force. He had done it to indirectly hurt his brother. Vash was still hurting from the last conflict they had had.

"You shouldn't have gotten her wrapped up in my life, it's only brought her sorrow," he said to them sadly.

Vash received a feeling of negation, but he didn't understand the cause of it.

He got a soul-image of Meryl but this one was a very "young" image, not as heavy-feeling with the passing of time and experience. This soul image communicated the idea that she had once visited one of the plants somewhere, Vash wasn't sure where, along with her father. Vash was amused by the sense of excitement and intrigue that had rippled out among the Kin at the unexpected discovery that day. There had never been a _female _of her kind born before. They had known from the fact that she existed _at all_ that the end of their arduous work was in sight. He got another soul image of Meryl, older now and full of sorrow, stumbling across one of the places where the mineral veins were strong enough to bring their Prescence in force. They had Asked. She had accepted (even if she hadn't understood all of it) and in return they had granted her wish... she would remain a normal woman until the day they Called upon her. Furthermore, in order to hedge their bets against the Opposition (they knew Knives would attempt to thwart thier plans if they let him) the sisterhood sealed away her memories of her unique nature.

"So you're saying she didn't know?" Vash guessed."Or at least, didn't remember."

Affirmation.

"Why did you feel it was necessary to send her to me then?" Vash demanded. "You could have just left her safe in December, you didn't have to get her mixed in with my mess... she could have gotten hurt, or _killed_, and then where would you be?"

Vash got the feeling of a hesitant negation, then the soul-sense of his brother... searching.

"You mean Knives already knew about her?"

Negation. Partial negation. The plant equivalent of a "sort of". Vash received the knowledge that Knives had known about the Resonants, but not who or what, specifically, they were, nor where to find them.

"And you guys thought it would be a _brilliant _idea to put a small collection of easy targets together for him did you?" Vash added dryly, shaking his head over their planning.

For a people that had managed to plan, rather successfully, the building of a great device for terraformation, apparently without the knowledge of anyone else, they could sure be naive sometimes.

Again negation, emphatic this time. Then Vash got an odd jumble of images. They were soul impressions; they were all vague and remote, as if seen from very far away, and they were all human, they flickered through his senses with a light cobwebby indefinition, but they all had one thing in common... love, devotion with one other person. Life pairing.

Vash just shook his head in incomprehension. They tried again, Vash received another flickering of soul impressions, very faint and very far removed, as if he were feeling sensing someone behind a barrier.

"!" Vash said in surprise.

Humans. That was how his bulb-kin sensed _humans_! They were vague and shadowy, but the Kin could sense the souls of their charges or rather, the people who worked closely with them. The Plant enginneers. They could sense their emotions, even in a very very limited sense sort of get an impression of the cares and concerns of what a person on the outside dealt with. Concern for another, ones partner in life.

Many of the plant engineers had been married over the time they had served the Sisterhood.

"I don't see what this has to do with anything..." Vash said uncomprehendingly.

Then he understood.

"Oh, you think that _all _humans marry?" he questioned, caught between disbelief and amusement.

Affirmation. He got the feeling of his twelve sisters and all the rest of them all smiling smugly down on him. They had sent her to him in order that they might do whatever it was that was done in the human way.

"Better not tell _her _that," Vash remarked wryly.

He got a feeling of question from his sisters and Vash sent back the feeling that Meryl would not be pleased at finding herself manipulated and toyed with in the matter of her own heart (and to be honest Vash was none too pleased with it either). It made everything they had shared and done together seem somehow fake and contrived. Even though the emotions were real, he was upset that they had meddled and manipulated something so important to him.

He got the mental equivalent of a blank look, and then a question involving Knives.

"_No _I don't think you should have sent her to _him_!" Vash snapped, irritated with them and horrified by the idea.

Knives would have strung her up and carved bloody strips off from her before feeding her to one of his pet sideshow freaks.

He got the feeling of a blank shrug and a whatever from them before they moved on to other matters.

:Sheesh, I love my odd little family, but there are times when I wish they loved me just a little less,: Vash thought Ruefully.

He had heard it said often that older sisters offten took it upon themselves to meddle in the affairs of their younger brothers. It seemed that there were things that were universal.

* * *

**Hee hee hee.**


	42. Line of Fire

Meryl gritted her teeth in irritation and took a deep breath, reminding herself to remain calm.

"Remember when you first began your lessons in firearms," she counseled herself, trying not to sound frustrated at herself.

Not a sound besides the soft shuffle of wind and sand penetrated the small cul-de-sac blind canyon down the wadis she had found to practice in after the storm had let up. Meryl had emerged from the underground storm shelter she'd made just before the sun had broke up over the horizon to start working out the rest of how to use grids as weapons, an activity she certainly could not do indoors. She'd found this little spot well hidden and away from prying eyes and started working out her method while she let Angelina and Miss Remembrance sleep in and rest up. She was defenseless and Meryl wasn't willing to remain that way, sof for the time being, while she was out int he wilderness without access to weapons of any other sort, she would make do with what she could.

"You didn't get those right away either."

It had taken over a month of practice sessions at the range every other day to get to the point where she could aim at a target and hit it with a reasonable level of accuracy. It had taken longer for her to even get the basics of hitting a target while it was in motion, and even now her range with accuracy wasn't all that impressive. She knew she'd never be more than a passably good shot, certainly nothing anywhere near Vash's level. She knew enough to be able to have an even playing field with most gunmen in the Outer and had to content herself with that. Still, she was better than anyone else in the office, including Milly, and she did take a little pardonable pride in a skill she'd worked at consistently to attain.

:_It just seems like everything I want to learn takes me more time than it should_...: she grumbled to herself.

Not like her brother who seemed to soak up new skills like a sponge, it was so unfair. Some times it seemed like all he ever had to do was look at something twice and he could pick it up and do whatever he wanted with it, where as Meryl had to spend hours and hours practicing and drilling herself in the basics before she could go anywhere with it. And to top it off, it always seemed like she was never anything more than competent with whatever she learned and he was a genius with it. It had been like that with tai'chi, with music, with schoolwork, with sports, with-

Meryl cut herself off as she felt the old sense of frustration rising within her. She took another deep breath, readjusted her balance, centered and sunk her weight and forced her mind to clear. She closed her eyes, took more deep breaths and rechecked her balance. Only when she absolutely certain that she had herself completely back within her control again did she reopen her eyes and squint back down the makeshift "shooting range" that she had set up in a narrow pocket canyon that dead-ended inside a bottleneck hidden behind a twisting rock formation some ways away from the little cave that she'd created for them to hole up in for the duration of the storm.

The pocket canyon was long and narrow, about ten feet across but stretching in between two four-story-tall sandstone cliffs worn away by wind and time for about two-hundred feet. She had set up "targets" neat rows of cairns of light-colored sandstones at intervals of fifty feet down the canyon. So far, any of the simple grids she'd come up with had yet to manage to hit a single target.

:_I don't get it_,: she thought in frustration.

She knew the grids worked. She'd tried them herself that morning. She'd drawn, grounded, centered and called up one of the simple grids she'd worked out the day before and junctioned the power to it and it had worked just fine. Flames, lightning bursts, energy blasts, flares, freeze mists... each of them had appeared within the little containment circle in front of her, but when she'd tried to make those same grids work aimed at a target she got nothing.

:_The grids are all working fine, I double-checked the parameters. There's nothing wrong my junctioning_.:

She took another deep breath, centered her weight and drew energy once again from the Source stone, barely even noticing the sting that the energy made on her channels, so absorbed was she in perfecting her new project, (she could be very focused that way), and carefully grounded centered and junctioned the power to her grid. Meryl observed it carefully to try and spot where she might be going wrong.

The grid junctioned just fine, the energy went into it and dispersed... But the targets remained untouched. Nothing froze over (she'd tried that grid she'd used already where she froze stuff). The soft wind changed direction, blowing air that was significantly colder into her face, after a few moments, the air warmed up.

Meryl frowned, a notion occurring to her.

:_I think I know where I went wrong_,: she thought, nearly kicking herself for her stupidity.

She turned on that alternate sight that let her see into the essence of things so she could verify her thought. Sure enough, she discovered colder vibrating molecules in a dense cloud around her, their energy patterns indicating that they'd recently been changed.

The grids were working just fine, fulfilling their functions. She'd forgotten to concentrate the _area _that was affected by the parameters of the grid, so the area that was affected was dispersed so much that the grid was ineffective.

"Good thing I didn't try to test out the fire one," she muttered to herself.

Cold air was harmless, but _fire _with no definite containment area could have gotten messy, quickly. She quickly adjusted the appropriate nodes.

:_I think I need some kind of targeting mechanism_,: she decided after a long moment of thought.

It took about an hour of trial and error before she came up with a way to create a targeting system that would be unnoticed to her targets but she would still be able to see it just fine. It relied on her using that "other" Sight however. In the sight that enabled her to see into the realm of energy, she could see a persons Aura. She could use that energy signature to mark them with a glowing blue "ring" around their middle that only she could see. That ring would mark the containment area for the grid she used against the target. The node was a little tricky. It took some work to figure out a way to enable it to lock onto an inanimate target.

"Okay," she thought, some time later (the sun was climbing high in the sky from its former position glowing along the horizon when she'd started) looking over her perfected grid with the new node on it.

Freeze grid, ready. She steadied herself, quelling her emotions as she carefully sighted and marked her target. A luminecent blue ring hovered around a small cairn of stones within her Sight.

"Game time."

Draw. Ground. Center. Shield. Grid. Junction. Release.

**_shhht!_**

Meryl blinked, elation upwelling within her. Fifty feet away a cairn of stones had turned to a taller spike of solid ice. Unbidden a real grin spread across her face. Success!

Un willing to relent after one sucessful test run, Meryl followed it up with the other grids she had prepared and adjusted already. The power flowing through her, manifesting itself as bolts of lightning, explosive balls of fire, powerful twists of wind and great spikes of ice appearing from out of nowhere at her summoning. It was a heady drink and she couldn't help the tide of euphoria that rose up within her as she saw her targets laid to waste before her. And she hadn't even used up all of the grids she'd worked out... she still had ones to test out against live targets as well.

She quickly got hold of herself. She wasn't some juvenile playing with fireworks! This was serious business meant to save her life and the lives of others. She straightened and surveyed her work with a critical eye. The targeting node functions worked as she had hoped, the containment area concentrated the parameters as she had designed, the functions themselves worked well. Everything was within the specified parameters... except the _time_.

:_It's taking me too **long**_,: she thought with annoyance.

Granted, it wasn't nearly as long to fire off an already prepped grid at a target than it took to come up with a grid from scratch to use, but with having to draw off ground center and junction and release it was taking longer than she wanted. It wasn't nearly as quick as firing a gun.

She straightened her spine.

"That just means I need to practice more," she told herself.

Nothing ever came easy for her it seemed. But she'd never let that stop her before.

:_Would I really like it if it was_?: she wondered at herself humorously. :_There must be something wrong with me_.:

Time passed in an unnoticed and unimportant blur as she pushed herself. Hard. She forced herself to speed up the process of drawing grounding centering and sheilding her Source, because on a battlefield those seconds could make a lot of difference. She couldn't afford to be slow. She had to be faster, better.

...

"That's about it for now," she told commanded herself once the suns were high overhead.

She was nearly drenched with sweat but she'd managed to merge the draw, ground, center of getting power from a Source stone into nearly one smooth action. A smooth sway of her dominant hand from down near her left hip across her torso to up near her right shoulder blurred together the separate functions of drawing,grounding centering and sheilding into one easy move. She was quite proud that she managed it in about three to five seconds. Junction the grid and release was the easy part, she could just snap her hand down and the power flared out into her grid.

"Well..." she reconsidered, looking at the remainder of the targets she had set up.

Ten all totaled. Ones she hadn't practiced on just yet.

"Let's just see what I can do."

She steadied her weight evenly on the balls and heels of her feet and clicked her watch. She quickly took in her targets, and marked them. Arm up (draw...groundcentershield) snap down.

Bam!

A satisfying cracka-boom of a white bolt of power struck literally from the blue accompanied with the scent of ozone and a blinding flash of blue white light burning across her retinas. One cairn was reduced to pebbles.

Bam! Whoosh! Shht! whoosh!

Four grids fired off in rapid succession. Then a final shhhhhhht sound accompanied Meryl covering her practice range with a soft rime of frost to cool off any remaining hot spots.

She checked the watch. One minute thirty seven seconds.

"Not as fast as a gun, but not bad," she grudgingly complimented herself.

Considering the fact that she hadn't been able to get it to work at all at first, and she'd only been doing this for a week... it was pretty darned good actually.

:_Maybe I shouldn't be so hard on myself and give myself a little more credit_,: she thought to herself.

She surveyed the blasted little pock-craters of blasted stone rubble that came from the mini-lightning strikes and the burnt areas that had been very breif miniature little infernoes a few moments before Meryl allowed herself a brief feeling of triumphant accomplishment.

:_Gotta admit, childish as it sounds, being able to blow stuff up is... pretty cool_.:

It felt exactly the same as the first time she'd ever managed to hit the bulls-eye of a target with her guns... only more so. This was something she'd built from scratch. Something only she could do. And that was vastly better than picking up a weapon that just any old person could use.

Meryl ran a few cool down stretches and drank from her canteen. She'd been at it all morning.

"Time to head back to camp," she ordered herself.

Fascinating as the new toy was, she didn't want to overdo it. Her channels were already twinging at her and she had the beginnings of another of her headaches, she didn't want to excaberate the situation.

She picked up the little satchel of Source stones she'd brought with her, secured her canteen to her waist, and pulled the makeshift dust-cape/mantle she'd discarded earlier back on and headed out of the little pocket canyon and back in the direction of camp.

She'd keep an eye out for any sign of wildlife on the way back and who knew, maybe they'd have a little fresh game for dinner. Protiens did a body good... and she was heartilly weary of meal bars! With this optimistic thought to cheer her she took the twisting trail back to their little "base" with a slight spring in her step.

Meryl hadn't even been thinking of trouble on her way back, and so hadn't been putting on her best guard, she had minimal defenses in place, a sheild around her thoughts and a passive vesion of the force-dispersal sheild she'd worked out the other day, as she headed back to the place she thought of as a safe-haven. it was sheerest luck that she heard and unfamiliar rough man's voice bouncing off the walls of the canyons nearby, a trick of the accoustics.

"Hurry it up you lazy slobs, ain't you found nuthin' yet?"

"We found 'em boss! They were hiding in a cave. This one here's a bit of a handful!"

"Well bring 'er out!"

A voice that was unmistakably Miss Remembrance made sound of protest and struggle.

"Let go of me!" she demanded. Clearly she had somehow gotten taken captive. Meryl rolled her eyes, recalling the altercation she had had with the fool woman that morning about keeping the sole loaded gun she'd managed to find for them on her at all times that Meryl wasn't there.

"I will not carry a gun!" she had insisted firmly.

Meryl had pushed her, tried to reason with her, tried to tell her that things were dangerous there on Gunsmoke, especially in the howling wilderness, but the little fool had dug her heels in and insisted that she was a pacifist and would have nothing to do with the wielding of a firearm.

"I'll carry a tune, carry a basket, carry on, carry over, Cary Grant, carry me back to old virginia!" she snapped in exasperation and real anger at Meryl. "But I will not carry a gun!"

Meryl had thrown her hands up in the air giving in. Stubborn fool woman. Meryl had supposed at the time that, since they were way out in the middle of no-where and the storm was just now over with, maybe their pursuers, if they were indeed still after them, were either lost or so far behind them, they couldn't possibly catch up within a single morning. Now Meryl berated herself for her naivete.

:_I should have insisted. I should have tried harder_!: Meryl kicked herself.

Miss Remebrance, while not exactly the most _sensible _woman Meryl had ever met, was a nice woman with a set of ideals she tried hard to live up to. Even though Meryl thought they were stupid, impossible ideals, she sort of admired the woman for sticking to her... non-guns. She was even beginning to grow on Meryl a little bit, foolish as she was.

:_And now it looks like someone's got her_,: Meryl thought guiltily.

Well, it looked like she was going to get a chance to field-test her new abilities a lot sooner than she had wanted to.

Knives looked on, idly thinking that since the creature had yet to put up any measure of fight at all, perhaps the security measures in place to transport it were a little over the top, but one never could be too cautious. The triple steel-reinforced box with nineteen separate locks and reinforced seams and corners wrapped about with titanium chains also locked in several different positions looked safe and he could hear the creature banging around inside of it begging to be let free. Knives sighed a little in impatience, it was taking forever!

"Master Knives," the human he had as his temporary right hand bowed subserviently upon entering his presence.

"What?" Knives asked, all boredom as he fiddled idly with the arm of his chair (more like a throne) in the comfortable waiting cabin of the Arc just off the main command room.

It wasn't an impressive vessel, he had been forced by circumstance the jerry-rig more than he had wanted to. In order not to put undue strain on the few siblings he'd had to keep company with him (the ones who had been healing him those past many years) he'd been forced to forego having a ship with proper anti-grav turbines and thrusters. Instead his arc more resembled and old-style zepplin. There was a massive polymer -cloth balloon filled with hydrogen under which the long, multi-level platform of his ship clung to it like a bottom feeder on the belly of a whale. It was guided by smaller engine turbines attached to the sides fanning it this way or that. It wasn't as fast as one might wish, nor as elegant, but what was time to a being like him and his siblings? It might not be pretty, but it would get the job done he was sure.

"Once the prisoner is loaded and secured in the hold we will be ready to depart," he/she reported unneccessarily.

Knives was already well aware of this, he did not, after all, reward incompetence so his close personal staff was of neccessity very competent at their work. They had to be if they wanted to live.

He nodded still to show that he acknowledged the information and the reporter was free to leave his presence, otherwise he would have had to stand there and await further orders.

Things were beginning to come together, exactly as he had planned. Well, perhaps not quite _exactly_... his brother was not there at his side to enjoy his triumph with him after all. And there was a further little hiccup in that Knives, despite his best methods of physical and mental torture had yet to secure the channels that the creature had that would enable him to interact with the Device, take it over, and use it for his own ends.

:_Still, I suppose things are going adequately_,: he reflected, trying not to feel frustrated and thwarted.

According to the eyes he had watching his brothers progress, he continued to be able to unlock the gates and secure the pieces of the keystone, and to be able to find his way to the next piece as well, though Strell the Carrion Crow reported that the origins of the necklace that led the way were still a mystery.

"Four pieces down, four still left to go," he muttered to himself.

What puzzled him the most however was that when he opened up his senses to detect the invisible web of powerful meridians and lesser ley-lines that had been woven subtly and carefully without his knowing over the many years that he had slept in recuperation, the map of power was beginning to change... or rather not the shape of it but the substance of it. The latent hum of energy along the great meridians and the lesser ley-lines was increasing as Vash visted each othe Great Nodes in turn and received a keystone. The Great Nodes were the places where several of the Great Meridians, the thickest and most powerful lines of energy that had been woven, met.

Knives had assumed, perhaps mistakenly, that the Great Nodes did nothing more than hold the pieces of the keystone, but as Vash gathered more and more pieces the Meridians were beginning to react. The lines that had held nothing more than a bare trickle of energy were now running rivulets of power, saturating the ground and air with energy. The towns and cities in gunsmoke were experiencing rolling blackouts (and much to Knives delight, were beginning to panic). Knives had a feeling that things were somehow spiraling out of his ability to control...

:_No_!: he said calming himself.

No that wasn't possible, things were _not _going wrong, and things were ot outside of his ability to control them, he was simply experiencing a few minor set backs, he would soon have matters well in hand again.

:_My brother already does as I bid_,: he soothed himself.

He'd do anything to keep that little human of his safe, ordering her abduction had been a stroke of genius on his part. It was easier by far to control the actions of one tiny little woman than it was to go through the effort of having one of his Guns go out and raze a town or two.

:_Or at least it **should **be_!: he snarled to himself, frustration rising again.

He gives one minor insignificant little task to his secondary squad and they can't even manage it. Three weak, helpless insignificant little captives to be kept caged and drugged until he could use them in his designs and they let them _escape_! Their incompetence knew no ends, and as asoon as he had the spare time to repimand them he would enjoy doing so to the fullest. He was not pleased at having to send his true right hand out to retreive them at such a crucial time. Things were coming together now and Knives desired that they should come together more smoothly than they were.

The Resonant yet disobeyed him, refusing to surrender his channels over to Knives, even though it had the temerity to beg for mercy from him, but this was not an insurmountable obstacle. Knives still had time to work on him and even if the thing still refused to cooperate it might be immaterial anyway once Knives had possession of the keystone (which Vash would happily trade over to have his little human back). Legato had not yet had success in securing the escaped prisoners, having suffered a set-back in the form of one of the areas massive midnight kamiseens, but this too would only be temporary. If the man could track down Vash the Stampede, three inexperienced women would not be a challenge for him.

:_Besides, my brother does not know that his little human girl is free of my dominion_,: Knives chortled to himself.

As long as his brother remained in ignorance of that fact he would continue to gather the keystones in the belief that he was doing so in order to save her life. Knives had no intention of enlightening him certainly. Besides he'd soon have the girl within his custody.

:_I wonder just what it is that he finds so fascinating about her_,: Knives mused to himself, since he had nothing else better to do.

He'd read Legato's file on the chit and had previously decided that his brother's attachment to the woman was nothing more than an exaggerated form of his usual sentimentalism for humanity... a by-product of his having spent so must time around one human in particular. Chapel had reported that he'd forged a bond of friendship with that traitor Wolfwood as well. Knives seethed inwardly at that; one of his Guns, a hired mercenary no less, (a _human_) got to spend more time with his brother than Knives had. It rankled.

:_In due time it will all be immaterial_,: he forced himself into calm. :_Once I have possession of the Gaea Device I will achieve Eden, wiping the world clean of the infectious plague that is humanity, freeing my kindred and reshaping the world as I see fit in one fell stroke_.:

The elegance of it appealed to him.

The obstacles in his path could be dealt with... _would _be dealt with. Eden, his own personal eden, was at hand.

"All is in readiness sir," the human he had choreographing the dance into the future reported to him.

Knives took a moment to savor the anticipation of the moment, it was the first step, the curtain was rising.

"Proceed," he commanded.

The lives were cast off and his arc rose slowly, even majestically, into the air. It floated up into the hot wind of the world, headed towards the future.


	43. Let cooler Heads Prevail

"I told you," the voice of miss Remembrance sounded in angry defiance at the unknown assailant. "It's just me here."

"Boss! There's two more packs in the cave," another voice, fainter than the first, called over.

"Well now... how would that be?" the first man, with a rough deep, slightly acccented voice, demanded of the poor captive, probably bound and terrified woman.

"If there's just you and three packs... that's a lot for one woman to carry all by her lonesome."

There was no audible answer.

"Aww c'mon now, there's no need to cry about it," the voice said with mock-sympathy a moment later.

Meryl heard another sniffle, like a soft little snick, bounce around the stone walls of the canyons, and was caught a little off-guard at the sudden feeling of rage that flooded her. Miss Remembrance was an innocent! A pacifist to the core, and though Meryl didn't agree with her idiot refusal to arm herself, she could respect the kind of strength it took not to take up arms when everyone around you was ready for battle. She wanted to protect that strength, that core of innocence to the woman who insisted that there was always a better way to do things than give in to violence. That instinctive protective part of Meryl flared up with righteous wrath on behalf of her strange comrade in arms (or escape from captivity).

:_Cool it_,: she counseled herself.

Going charging in there, metaphysical guns blazing, was a good way to get herself captured or hurt as well. If she wanted to have any chance of rescuing Miss Remembrance she'd better see to not being captured herself. She could track them back to their lair and figure out a way to neutralize them, or at least have a better chance of making it out of there with Miss Remembrance in tact.

:_My strength doesn't really lie in acting on the fly_,: she acknowledged to herself.

She was more of a study the opposition and come up with a plan to defeat them kind of fighter. Mister Vash might be able to take enemies out one by one on the fly, but Meryl required other means to fight.

:_I wish Milly were here_!: she thought, not for the first time, and probably not for the last.

Meryl felt that irritatingly familiar buzzing burn along her senses and looked over her shoulder. Sure enough, there was Angelina, alert and unharmed. Her wings glowed their soft white luminance and her expression, for the first time since Meryl had met her, was not that unblinking, unfocused, distant gaze like a blind person, but was actually looking straight at her.

Angelina made a strange little chirruping noise and Meryl got an empathic feeling that they should be going somewhere. Angelina couldn't use words to communicate, so any attempts she had ever made at trying to get a point across had all been through vague feelings and emotional impressions. Sure enough, a moment later Angelina turned around and headed back into the canyons.

"Where are you going?" Meryl hissed when she caught up to the angel. "The kidnappers are back _that _way, we can't just abandon Miss Remembrance."

Angelina replied with a soft croon followed by a reassuring chirp and continued going. The nearby canyons twisted around under the blue sky for a little ways then they abruptly dipped under the ground in labyrinthine curved tunnels dotted here and there by natural sky-lights in the ceiling. Once the daylight was gone Meryl called up a little ball of light under a shield, though it wasn't as necessary as it would normally have been since Angelina gave off a soft silvery glow of her own. The nice thing about the tunnels was that it kept them out of sight, however Meryl could not help but fret that they might be getting farther and farther away from Miss Remembrance, and might loose her completely.

"Angelina, Miss Remembrance is back that way," Meryl tried to insist even as she followed the strange angel down into the darkness of the lava tunnels.

"I know you're anxious to reach your bondmate but we can't just leave her in the hands of those kidnappers."

No reply met her statement. Meryl frowned and stopped.

:_Why am I following her anyway? I should be trailing those men_!:

Angelina made an insistent chirping noise and Meryl felt something like a "tug" along her senses. She debated ignoring it and doing what she felt was better, but the tug she felt had felt urgent, like "just a little more".

Meryl shrugged. She didn't actually know the way back through the tunnels since she hadn't marked her way so it looked like the only way out was through. As soon as she made it out into sunlight, Meryl would have to part ways with the angel and head back to that camping place to pick up Miss Remembrance's trail. Already she worried about the amount of time she'd been following Angelina on her strange goose hunt through the dark. She felt guilty for abandoning Miss Remembrance to the clutches of a bunch of raiders, who knew what they were doing to her already?

:_Temporary plan, get out and get back to her_,: meryl told herself. :_I can hunt down Angelina later, after I've got Miss Remebrance out safe_.:

That sounded so confident, like she actually knew what the hell she was doing.

She quickly caught up to her odd winged guide in time to have to crawl through one particularly tight spot. After a claustrophobic few minutes, the tunnel widened back out to where they could stoop then turned sharply upwards.

There was an opening to one side that looked out into a large round cavern, possibly the inactive caldera of one of the smaller volcanoes that had been there. There was a yellowish orange light dancing in through the opening. Meryl froze and crept cautiously closer.

:_I reassess my opinion of Angelina's faithfulness_,: Meryl thought to herself a little guitily.

She'd thought the Angel was ditching Miss Remembrance now that the woman had become a hinderance to her quest to reach her bondmate as quickly as possible, but in reality she'd been leading them to their base.

Well, it looked like it was time to do what she did. Meryl began taking a head count.

* * *

Milly and Jessica were in the pro-tem lounge just off the lab where the doc was happily analyzing data when Vash squelched in through the doorway. He was soaked completely, some kind of odd shiney silvery liquid that reminded Milly of mercury dripped off from him. The doc glanced over, and without a greeting, took a sample off from him and got back to his work.

"Mister Vash!" Milly exclaimed in surprise. "What happened in there?"

Milly could just feel that Vash was unsettled, even though he was trying his best not to show it. Something had shaken him.

He held up the keystone which had the last quarter section of it that had been missing until now filled in. It was a opaquely shiney pyramid-shaped thing that looked like it was made of obsidian but oddly, dancing seemingly just under the surface of it was a strange very faint smokey grey light, tiny spiderweb-thin lines dancing and weaving in and out of each other in indetirminate patterns.

"We head north now," was all Vash said. "North and west, coordinates oh-eight-by-oh-three-by-oh-seven-by-oh-nine-by-oh five-by-oh-five."

The Doc blinked and entered in the coordinates both on the ships nav-panel and on the program he had running in the background that anaylyzed the points they had visited for corelations.

"Hah!" The doc crowed when he entered the numbers Vash had given him and skimmed once more over the results.

"Ha what?" Jessica asked curiously.

"They're all related, I knew they had to be," the Doc said sounding slightly smug.

He called up a hologram over the table they were currently playing checkers on, Milly and Jessica obligingly moved the board so that the holo could show through all the way. There was a see-through globe of the planet spinning slowly in it. There was the lands occupied by humans blotted in in green light with points of varying sizes within it. On a small slice the easternmost half of the green blot that was where the humans nestled together like puppies warming one another against the cold was a darker green area and just a bit further beyond that was the first bright yellow point. There were two more bright yellow points on an equidistant curved triangle along the surface of the globe. The fourth yellow point, flashing slightly then, was off at an angle but equidistant from the first three points.

"They're called the Great Nodes," Vash said.

He took a stylus from a nearby surface and began drawing on the holographic globe. Four rings that were neither longitude nor latitude lines circling the globe in four different colors of softly glowing light. Three of the rings interlocked around the sides, one ring covered a circular section of about one third the globe, interlocking with another ring that covered another third of the globe all three of them bound by a fourth colored ring that went directly around the equator.

"Picture four rings going around the surface of the world, each ring meeting another ring at two points. Red and green meet once on one side of the world and once on the other, green and yellow meet once on one side of the world and once on the other and so forth and the fourth ring ties them all together."

Vash dotted the intersection points in bright white light. There were twelve of them in all, four of which were already highlighted yellow, the places where keystones had been collected.

"The four lines are called meridians and they carry the combined power of all Plants that can connect a ley-line to them."

"Ley line?" Jessica questioned.

"You're familiar with old earth geography, think of a tiny stream leading to a larger river," vash replied. "Meridians have smaller ley-lines leading off from them sorta like nerves leading off your spinal coloumn taking in sensations and giving out signals."

"But there aren't plants on most of the surface of the world," Doc pointed out. "They can be found almost entirely just where people live and that's only in one cluster."

Doc nodded to the green blotted stripe over the surface of the globe that signalled where almost the entirety of the ships that had survived the crash and opened out.

"They're all kept pretty busy providing the basic needs for the people and so they can't supply enough power to run the Gaea Device over the whole planet."

"Ay there's the rub," Vash agreed. "They have something up thier sleeve, that's for sure, but apparently that information is on a need to know basis... and they feel I don't need to know."

"Mister Vash," Milly said, looking at him hopefully. "The stone doesn't look like it has any more pieces missing to it, does that mean we're done collecting it and we can go get sempai?"

"Sorry Milly," he said with genuine regret, shaking his head. "It's only half complete. We still have four more pieces to go. There's another half capped onto this one, making it an octahedron, looks like a flourite crystal shape."

"Oh," she said, slumping forward in disappointment.

Vash patted her shoulder commiseratingly.

"I wish we were done too," he said.

"Wait wait wait," Doc said. "There are twelve great nodes, but only eight keystone pieces?"

"Well, nine actually," Vash muttered scratching the back of his head. "There's more to the Gaea Device than just putting all the keystone pieces together."

"What's that mean Mister Vash?" Milly asked curiously.

She caught him trying to hide a blush. Something was up. Something was definately up.

"Well..." he hesitated, pulling out his sunglasses, Milly came instantly to attention, then he continued.

"The sisters who have been creating this Gaea Device have apparently been doing it for a very long time, many human generations I think, though they don't regard time the way anyone else does, so it's hard to tell. Still, they have apparently feared interference by a malevolent force, or simply someone trying to use the Device for their own ends, so as a safeguard they made a ninth component to the Device, or perhaps they were required to have than ninth component anyway in order to make the keystone work... I honestly can't tell. Anyway, there are eight pieces to this keystone right here at eight of the twelve Great Nodes, but there is a ninth "piece" that is required to trigger the keystone and make the Gaea Device work."

"How will we know how to find this ninth piece?" the Doc questioned. "Will the keystone lead us there?"

"I already know where it, or rather, _she_, is," Vash replied grimly.

Milly blinked for a long moment and hesitantly said

"You don't mean... you can't mean _sempai_."

Vash nodded, face set in a hard expression that gave away nothing, his glasses hiding his eyes from view.

"But then mister Knives-"

"Has the final piece of the keystone," Vash confirmed grimly. "Without it, this is no more than a pretty rock. My sisters have apparently been manipulating her family for generations. Meryl doesn't know about it because they apparently got her consent as a child to do a service for them and then clouded her mind so that she wouldn't remember what she knew. Her father finished the last stage of their device a few years ago and I think he gave his life to complete it, the angels have been vague about it even with me. Anyway, our one hope to get her back safe is that Knives doesn't realize what he has in his keeping. Things have just gotten dicier."

"But Sempai can't possibly be... I'd have _noticed_," Milly protested.

"Not if she wasn't aware of it herself, which I think is what they were counting on," Vash replied. "That said, we should get going to the nearest Great node so that we can finish this keystone before Knives realizes that there's anything unusual about Short Girl."

The other occupants of the cabin turned back to their work stations, Doc entered in the coordinates to the nearest Great Node and commanded maximum speed. Vash mentioned that the ship was a little old for putting it under than kind of strain.

"She may be an old girl but she'll hold together long enough for this Vash. After that it won't matter so much."

Vash nodded curtly and went back to staring silently out the window. He hadn't mentioned to Milly the other half of the equation, that Meryl would have to draw power from a Plant, one of his own kind, in order to safely activate the keystone. It had been explained to him that her kind, a race called "resonants" could only work in pairs and they Bonded for life. Opposite gender pairs.

Normally, it was explained to him, that wouldn't be a problem, Resonants bred to the male because they were meant to Bond with angels (who were all female with the sole exception of himself and his brother), but Meryl had been a unique case from the start. She had been born female, and with the ability to access her Channels, which the Sisters had explained to him, meant that she was able to use the power that Angels produced as a matter of course. She could only Bond with a male of their kind... that left her only two options realistically speaking. She could Bond with him, or she could Bond with Knives.

:_She can Bond with Knives over my dead body_,: Vash swore to himself, not really trying to supress the surge of jealousy he felt at the mere thought of his brother laying claim to the lady he cherished. Knives would only seek to coerce and _use _her, Vash...

:_I love her_,: he was forced to acknowledge to himself, really being brutally honest was hard.

He would never force her into doing something she didn't want to do, and if there was one thing he knew about Meryl it was that when times got tough, she got stubborn. She was not the sort of woman who would quietly lie down and take her destiny. The Sisterhood might think that they had everything all nicely planned out and arranged, but they had reckoned without Meryl's sheer perversity; if they came at her saying 'do this or do that because it's what you are destined to do' Meryl was going to dig her heels in and not move an inch. Even if she happened to feel the same way about Vash that he felt about her (and, though there had been positive signs, the evidence was far from conclusive) there was a huge gap between "possible boy friend material" and "mated forever, whether you like it or not". He foresaw troubled times ahead.

* * *

**Two-fer update, hope it was worth the wait! This and the previous chapter was originally one long chapter, but I split it up so it was easier to read. **


	44. Rescue Run

She'd been studying them for over an hour and taking stock of the terrain. As a fortified location, it was a good one. Except for the sole backdoor that Angelina had snuck her in through, the place was walled by solid rock on three sides. The fourth side was a large cave entrance guarded by no less than four snipers all keeping a close watch. Parked off along the right side of the cave wall was a large piece of lost technology, Meryl had never seen anything like it with her own eyes through she had seen pictures, it was called a shuttle and it was used to transport people very fast over long distances. There was at least one more person inside, though she did not know who; she assumed that it was the boss for the oddly familiar looking peons walked in to report briefly before going back to their assigned duties. Miss Remembrance was right next to the fire in the exact center of the cave where everyone was keeping an eye on her.

:_Hm, can't just sneak in and sneak out with her then_,: Meryl thought.

She was right in the middle of the cave next to the fire where no-one could possibly miss seeing her. Why couldn't this be more like the movies, where the hostages were kept conveniently off to one side?

They were strangely well coordinated for what would usually be nothing more than a collection of bandits. There were four people manning the post at the entrance at all times and when they manned it they did not slack off like she would have expected. The seven ringed around the inner fire were not drinking or gambling but were seriously guarding their prisoner, their guns were at the ready and their faces were alert. There were ten more with torches ringed around the perimeter to keep things well lit and it was only through a trick of cave formations casting shadows that Meryl had avoided detection so far at all.

There was one of her and twenty seven of them, not counting whoever might be inside the shuttle waiting. She was no Vash the Stampede to go dancing in like an idiot and dodge bullets and challenge the leader to a shootout. Besides the obvious difficulties, there was one anomaly that worried her.

In order to get a more accurate count of them, Meryl had switched to that other-sight that allowed her to see into the realm of energy so that their auras would light up and she could take a better head count... but when she did so, something had grabbed her attention...

A persons meridians, when they were opperating normaly spiraled uninhibited throughout their limbs and through the three main dan'tien in their bodies, but these guys had something wrapped around thier dan'tien. It reminded her of the strangler-vine, a parasitic plant that could sometimes be found wrapping itself around certain kinds of lowland shrubs in the canyons. The alien meridian glowed a strange blue-gold against the normal parti-colored ropes of the bandits native meridians. It caged it in and it pulled on their meridians like a puppetmaster would pull strings.

Meryl couldn't actually communicate with Angelina, but when she'd come up with her theory that that strange meridian might have something to do with their abnormal behavior (for bandits anyway) and looked over at the angel, she was certain that she had gotten a feeling of confirmation.

Someone was controlling their bodies. Meryl remembered with a shiver how it had felt when someone had controlled her own body against her will. It certainly made her a little leery of going up against someone with that kind of power again. Being what she was might just make her _more _vulnerable rather than less vulnerable to psychic attack, and Meryl was very much afraid that if she were to meet the person controlling them face to face that _she _would end up that persons slave.

:_It looks like the best plan of attack is to knock them all off guard, distract them and see if I can't sneak in under the confusion and sneak out with Remembrance_,: Meryl thought to herself after having taken another careful headcount and taken note of the positions.

It was a good thing she already had grids worked out for this. First she could use the smoke screen grid to blanket the bottom of the cave in a fog bank so thick no-one could see through it. A distraction could be added by generating many spheres of light at the entrance so that they would think that there were people invading from there. Fire and explosions here and there would only confirm the feeling of being under attack. Meryl could do fire and explosions. While everyone was busy shooting at the entrance, Meryl would sneak in through the back and sneak out with Miss Remembrance. With any luck, she wouldn't encounter anyone.

:_But if I do, I guess it will be the perfect opportunity to test out those meridian-snapping grids_,: she thought to herself.

There were grids she hadn't tested out that morning because they required live test subjects to try them on. She couldn't very well try them on herself because she didn't know if what worked on her would work on anyone else (Meryls meridians being so weird and all). Meryl had only gotten to try out the more dangerous grid-patterns she'd worked out; fire, lightning bolts, freeze, explosions. She didn't really like the idea of testing something out untried on another person, true these kidnappers were her enemies but she didn't really wish them any harm.

:_But then again, they **did **start it, so I guess they deserve what they get_,: she shrugged mentally.

If her knock-them-safely-unconscious grid didn't work out, she could always either light their feet on fire or snap their meridians manually like she had with that first batch of kidnappers. Either way, Meryl didn't intend to leave this place without that troublesome Miss Remembrance.

She had a sketchy battle plan, she had absolutely no back-up, and if she was captured she was probably going to be handed over to Knives and he was not likely to be very amused by her first escape. All in all, it sounded like a recipe for disaster.

:_I wish Milly were here_!: Meryl thought, a knot of fear clenching her belly as she mentally went over the grids she was going to be using in the upcoming fight. Smokescreen, lights, fire, explosions...

:_What should I call those meridian-snapping knock-them-unconscious grids, because that's a bit of a mouthful...: _she wondered to herself.

Part of her knew that she was bothering with trivialities right then because she was scared. She didn't have Milly watching her back, she couldn't claim that it was part of her job, and there was no-one to miss her or track her down if she should go missing. She was on her own and it far from a relif to not have to watch out for anyone.

"Tazer-grid?" she thought to herself.

It worked a little like one, so it would do for a title.

She looked down again at the well-organized collection of guards standing watch over the captive and wondered again what kind of nasty surprise was waiting for her inside the shuttle.

"I'm not getting any younger," she told herself.

She checked to see that her pouch at her waist was full of Source Stones as well as the three larger ones she had hung on a string around her neck and the slightly smaller string of Source Stone beads she had at her wrist in case of emergency. They were her only weapons after all.

She dropped down to her belly, and crawled elbow-over-elbow to a closer position, fixing the smokescreen grid in her mind. Meryl began drawing off power from one of the source-stones she had stored in her pouch and started weaving the grid she was going to use.

Legato could feel his host-body's former consciousness chafing away at the restrictions placed on him and he took a sort of amusement from it. It was the same sort of amusement one gets from watching a little mouse in bell-jar running around probing at the walls of its container trying to find a way out. He knew it was impossible and yet it was fun to watch him try. The little remnant had gotten even more frantic and insistent after the woman had been brought in. Oh the former traitor didn't know the woman personally, it just bothered him having _any_ woman at Legato and his masters non-existent mercy.

He shrugged off the poor ghost's frantic probes at the walls of his prison when one of Legato's thralls came in to make his report. There had been no success in finding and capturing the other two women, including the Angel that Master was most anxious to have back within his care. Angels outside of the plant bulb were a rarity, and the Master was most eager to converse with this one and discover the answer to the mystery of how she had come to be out there. And then there was of course the Master's brothers little human woman, feisty little thing that she was, she'd proven herself to be more clever and resilient than expected, first in escaping from captivity, and then in eluding capture for so long.

:_I believe that the angel must have been shielding her telepathically from detection_,: Legato decided.

It was the most logical explanation after all, not all Plants were so very inept with their powers as Vash had proven himself to be. In fact Legato would be willing to bet that even _most_ plants were not as inept with thier gifts as Vash, it was a conscious decision on his part, one that had cost him dearly. Legato sensed a gritted-teeth-with-anger feeling from the ghost under the glass that Legato had stuffed away in a corner. Well, no-one had asked _him_.

He had been just about to consider catching a little sleep when his mind was suddenly flooded with the feeling of surprise and near panic from his thralls.

"Enemy attack! Enemy attack!" cried one of the snipers that Legato had placed nearest the door.

...

A few hours ago, Legato had closed the door on a safe, well-regulated fortress of a base-camp and now opened it on a screaming madhouse. There were explosions and bursts of fire painting the air orange-gold, cries of fear and violence, the caverns rang with the staccato of gunfire. The air was choked with a colorless odorless smoke in a miasma so thick that it was hard for even light to penetrate very far into it. He could see his hand at the end of his arm but that was about it. He could see blurbs and blobs of light dancing about in the darkness but it was impossible for a normal person to tell whether they belonged to ally or enemy. His thralls, acting on their own, were firing blind into the dark and by the sound of things were managing to hit more of _themselves _than any enemies attacking.

The fire went out abruptly and without warning plunging them from a partly lit, dense fog into a nearly dark dense fog. A multitude of lights appeared at the entrance flooding in past the snipers (who could not see anything anyway and had by all appearances actually shot each other) and fanned out over the room. Legato frowned, noticing something amiss.

He sent out his mental powers at the lights that signified the "invaders" and caught nothing, not even a whisper of a consciousness. So, they were either all telepaths capable of shielding from a powerful teep like him (highly unlikely), or Legato and all of his thralls had all just been _had _(far more likely).

He reached out his power to his thralls and froze them all where they stood. He disregarded the injured ones and pulled the torch-bearers from their places around the perimeter of the cavern and into the center to join the guards around the bait, the woman they had kidnapped earlier that morning. That was why he had placed her out in the open in the middle of the cavern next to the fire after all. It had worked like a charm, though the oddity of the method of attack was strangely efficient. If Legato hadn't had such a firm control on all of his thralls they'd have been scattered about, panicked and easy to pick off one by one.

Legato's thralls all circled around their captive, guns pointed out at his command, though he could not seem to keep them from shooting at every explosion that blasted into the sand and the mysterious lights that had no people behind them. Vash the Stampede was no-where in evidence, and besides, laying in an ambush and risking that people might be killed by friendly fire wasn't his style anyway. He would more likely come strolling in the front entrance to challenge him directly. Idiot.

:_So that means that she's here, somewhere_,: Legato thought, smugly satisfied that his ploy had worked so well.

He couldn't explain exactly how she had managed a smokescreen, explosions and lights that looked like the signal flares of a coordinated invasion force so well, his guess would be that she may have somehow come across a hidden smugglers cache of armaments, but that didn't matter... she was nearby, trying to get to the bait, and it would only be a matter of time before Legato had her and the Angel in custody.

It had been working so well for a few minutes, there had been chaos, panic, pandemonium and disorder and Meryl had been sneaking in low along the floor. She'd discovered that she could use her Othersight to see the auras of her enemies through the fog. It was like having heat-vision goggles on. Their bodies and positions were lit up like Christmas trees shining in the darker background of the cavern. She'd also found that her tazer-grid was working well, though it didn't stun them for very long. They were out for a few seconds then back on their feet wondering what had just happened. Still a few seconds was long enough for her to sneak by them without detection. She snickered a little to herself, they were all too busy firing at the decoy-lights at the front of the cave.

Another cry of agony off to her left made her twinge with guilt. She was inexperienced in this commmando thing and had forgotten to take into account friendly fire. It turned out that it wasn't very friendly for _them_. She knew she'd feel just terrible if anyone were killed by a stray bullet.

She momentarily wished that Vash were there, he might be bad for property damage, but when he was involved in a hostage situation mostly no-one got hurt.

:_Well he's not here and you're on your own_,: she told herself.

She consoled herself with the fact that if this had been a hostage situation as handled by the federal marshals they'd have come in guns blazing and been aiming to kill. So really they were lucky they got her.

Things had been going pretty well for the first few minutes. While everyone else was running around screaming and shooting, Meryl had been keeping low to the ground ducking from cover to cover and keeping a low profile. By dodging sentries and stunning those she couldn't avoid, she had actually made it halfway to her destination. That was when the door to the shuttle off to the right had opened and things had gone from wonderfully useful chaos to dangerously organized ( dangerous for her anyway).

She couldn't actually "see" his face on account of the smokescreen but she caught sight of his meridians and aura well enough. Meryl froze where she crouched behind a small stack of supplies and stared hard at the strange meridians entering the battlefield.

:_Those are **not **normal_...: Meryl thought puzzled and unnerved by the mystery.

The man, whoever he was, had two sets of dan'tien and meridians. The first set of dan'tien were located at the navel and sternum (the Source and the heart dan'tien's) and glowed a dull sickly reddish orange. The meridians leading out from those were all dull and twisted, tangled within a cage of brighter more dominant gold and greenish-blue that came solely out from a dan'tien centered in the forehead.

:_That's **impossible**_!: Meryl thought in utter shock and mystification.

She wasn't certain _how _she knew, but she knew deep down that the meridians and dantien were two different entities, consciousnessess trying to house themselves within one body. The one at the Source dantien (navel) was the person who was supposed to be in the body and the one at the forehead dantien was an interloper that had somehow seized control.

Meryls mind flashed back to the way it had felt when her own limbs had come under Legato's command and she shivered, she felt very sorry for that poor man, whoever he was. It was terrible to be in the grip of a power that one had no way of fighting back against. When Meryl looked again she saw that not only was the person nestled in the forehead dan'tien controlling the actions of the person emerging from within the shuttle, but she saw also that there were tendrils branching out from within the interloping forehead -dan'tien to all of the other men in the room, taking hold of thier third dan'tien, like a puppet-master pulling on marionette strings. The one in the forehead and using that to force his will on them. She shivered again. She was just going to get in and get out as quickly as possible, before he noticed she was there. That in mind, Meryl began inching back along the floor toward the center where she could see Remembrance's aura burning brightly with fear and defiance.

It was at that moment that all the men in the room froze momentarily and the ones along the wall rushed into the center, surrounding Remembrance in a wall of flesh bristling with guns and Meryl understood.

:_It's a trap_,: she thought with a sinking feeling of dismay.

**That **was why they had put her right out in the open instead of stowing her, tied up in the shuttle. They had wanted anyone attempting to rescue her (i.e. herself and Angelina) to see where she was and go straight for her. Remembrance was the bait and Meryl had bitten. They knew that she was there and that they had her outnumbered.

:_But I'm not just a poor office girl with a can of teargas and a gun_,: she thought.

Her mind was racing. She could see about half of the men that had been brought in to guard Miss Remembrance abruptly branch out and start fanning the area in a definate search pattern, likely with some kind of stunner or weapon to bring her down. She was running out of time.

:_Crap_!: she fought against the rising swell of panic at the thought of capture and being at the mercy of such a telepath again. She forced her mind out of that non-thinking fight-or-flight instinct and onto the level of thinking and planning. She had a few minutes before they found her, the smoke was still too thick to see in and (because of her use of the other-sight) she could still see them but they couldn't see her. She had a lot more advantages, she just had to figure out how to utilize them. Quickly.

-_Come out come out wherever you are_,- a cold, familiar voice resounded inside her mind.

Meryl froze with the kind of terror a rabbit has when it is in the gaze of not just one but an entire pack of predators. She had felt that mind-presence before and he had haunted her nightmares ever since.

-_Now, now, little woman, there's no need to be shy_,- the smooth voice continued.

Meryl began to shake.

-_I'm sure the Master will be quite forgiving of your refusal to enjoy his hospitality_.-

:_How_?: she wondered to herself, wondering if he already knew where she was and was just toying with her or if he really couldn't see her.

How could this be possible? She had _seen _him get shot, point-blank, _in the forehead_. She had dealt with the aftermath... hell, she had even burned his body herself! The smell of smoke and cooking meat gone slightly off still clung in her nostrils and pervaded some of her most restless nights.

He was dead! Dead! Dead! Dead! _Dead_! No more, deceased, passed on, rigor mortis, departed... he was dead as a doornail. But that was inarguably his voice and she'd know that cold, implacable, scary-as-hell voice anywhere. There was no mistake... it was the man who had taken control of her body that day.

-_He was not eager to enjoy your own hospitality, human, even with his brother in it with him. That's only to be expected, why should perfection be expected to lodge itself in among inferior beings? It's a crime against nature_.-

I_t was definately his Voice, speaking with all of the cold geniality of a man who had his prey on the run and knows that it is only a matter of time before it is run to ground._

_:But it's impossible, he's **dead**_!:

She saw a powerful (Meryl had come to equate thick ropes of meridians with having a lot of power) meridian flow out from the forehead of ...of Legato Bluesummers. She couldn't argue that it was him. It was **definitely **him, but she'd seen him die. A man _couldn't_ recover from a wound like that. He'd been shot in the _head_. The meridian began to slowly weave in and out around the room, searching, searching...

That led to the realization that...

:_He can't sense me_!: Meryl thought through her terror. :_He knows I'm here, but he can't sense me_!:

Indeed the meridian passed right over her without a pause to rest as if she wasn't even there. That galvanized her from frozen terror to action. He couldn't sense her, so as long as she kept up the smokescreen, avoided his sentinels, and kept herself out of his way she should be able to make it out of there with no-one the wiser.

Draw, junction release.

Boom! Meryl continued setting off explosions around the perimeter and kept the lights moving. She crept closer. She was almost there.

:_How do I get Miss Remembrance out from under guard though_?: she wondered at herself.

There were three times as many surrounding the poor woman than there had been at first. Meryl had originally been counting on the confusion and general pandemonium to distract them enough to sneak off with her.

Meryl decided to heck with it, he already knew she was there anyway. She called up her tazer grid and started drawing junctioning and releasing over and over again, picking off the captors one by one. They fell over in an almost comical fashion and made a very satisfying thump when they hit the ground.

"psssst!" Meryl hissed at Remembrance who, to her credit, was on her feet straining away at the chain that was bolted to a metal stake hammered into the floor. Meryl smirked. It was the first grid she'd ever mastered.

Shhht!

The chain froze brittle and solid, Remembrance seeing that and remembering the first time it had happened, seized and twisted the section as hard as she could. It snapped, exactly as the first one had. Just as Remembrance bolted for freedom she was caught around the arm by one of the men guarding her and pulled off her feet. The tendril that possessed that particular guards meridians flared up as the puppet-master gained greater control of his puppet. There was the sound of a gun-hammer being cocked back. Remembrance stared out into the room with wide, frightened eyes as the unnamed bandit held a cocked and loaded gun to her head.

-_Unless you wish your pretty friend's little brains splattered on the stone, I suggest that you cease your distractions and find a way to get rid of this smoke screen_.-

The command came from Legato, who saw more or less everyone as being expendable, even himself. He'd do it.

Meryl doused her lights and stopped blowing up random parts of the cave at once. It was all dark and silent for a minute except for the groans of the injured. The smoke began to thin when Meryl cut off the power she was junctioning to it, clear air flowed down from the ceiling leaving behind only a soft cloud-like covering on the floor. After a moment or two the smokescreen dissipated to nearly nothing.

She could see the guards clearly from her position crouched behind a jumble of supplies and if she could see them with normal Sight they would be able to see her if she broke cover.

-_Come out where I can see you_,- Legato commanded. -_Slowly. With your hands raised_.-

:_Okay, first plan's a bust, I guess we'll just have to rely on the old Insurance Girl stand-by... negotiation_.:

"Now, now Mister Bluesummers," Meryl called out into the room, her best senior insurance class A-1 disaster investigator voice. Nary a tremble or a catch to betray how very very nervous she was.

"Surely you can't feel threatened by little ol' me now can you?"

She stood from where she crouched, very slowly, with her hands raised above her head. She found approximately fifteen guns trained on her. She swallowed a little. One or two, yes she'd had that happen before (and it had made her nervous enough) but fifteen? It made her wonder how Vash handled it all the time. She certainly didn't like it one bit. Meryl turned slowly to face her captor, for the first time; up until now she had identified him by his mind voice alone. She'd been expecting to see the blue hair, gold eyes and emotionless face of the man whose corpse she had burned and buried those months ago. She raised her chin from where it was tucked in looking down at the ground, determined that she was going to meet his face, the face that had haunted her nightmares, without a trace of fear.

The face was familiar alright, the lines and angles well known to her, but it was not familiar in the _expected _manner. The breath was driven from her chest in an explosion of surprise as her muscles momentarily clenched up.

She stared in shock, her mind refusing to comprehend the face her gaze met with. A single word escaped unbidden from her mouth as her mind numbed over with shock.

"Wolfwood."

* * *

**Dun dun duuuuun! (Reveiw.)**


	45. Mortal Coiled

His head resting sideways on the table Vash stared in absent-minded fascination at the perfect-looking pyramid resting on the cool reflective surface of the table, the scenery whizzing by in a blur just beyond it.

Halfway there, it had seemed to take forever just to gather up those four peices and that was in the node-cluster nearest human habitation, the other set was nearly on the other side of the world. The old ship was traveling faster than anyhting that existed anywhere else in the world but to Vash, who was worried about Meryl, it seemed to travel at a snails pace.

"What's our ETA?" Vash asked again. He already knew the answer he was just somehow hoping that it had changed between then and now, they'd stumbled acroos some space compressing wormhole or something.

"Exactly seventeen minutes less than the last time you asked Vash," the Doc replied absently from where he was going over all of the data he had compiled and putting it together with what Vash had reported to him from his siblings. "We still have nineteen more hours until we reach the nearest Great Node in the next cluster."

"Aww maan," Vash muttered to himself.

Part of it was boredom but it was mostly impatience. He wanted to be _there _already, he wanted to be there gathering the peices he needed to free Meryl.

"If you'd like," Jessica said brightly. "We could play a game. I know chess and checkers and cards and-"

"No thanks," he said dully, his head still resting on his arms.

The pendant was buzzing again, it had been doing that fairly constantly all day. Vash didn't know what to make of it. One more mystery piled atop all the others. Some had been explained to him but others were still as mysterious.

Like what exactly was that pyramid made out of? Vash just knew that he had seen that stone somewhere before but he just couldn't place where. It was dark and glassy-shiny, like obsidian, and yet was made of a crystalized element that, according to the doc, was not featured anywhere on the periodic table of elements.

He glanced over to where Milly sat, polishing and examining the new stun-gun that Marlon had given her, and his mind made an intuitive leap, formed a connection between the stone and the gun. The stone, the obsidian pyramid, was made from exactly the same material that the "seed" hidden away in the secret compartment of Vash and Knives dueling colts were. It was the thing that had burned blackly with inverted energy when his angel arm had activated that first time.

Vash's mind caught on that. He had often wondered what it was that had possessed his brother to gift him with unusual boon of a gun to match his own, he had always assumed that it had been his brothers way of declaring his challenge; he had given his brother a gun that was equal and opposite to his own so that they could go at each other on an equal level. But there was more to it than that.

:_The Seed inside the gun must act as some kind of power channeler, a way to focus and access the energy in our arms_,: Vash thought.

Well that was one relief anyway. Knives was still dangerous, he still had henchmen, but at least he was weaponless and couldn't access his angel arm, nor did he have Legato to run his little sideshow of horrors.

:_So count your blessings Vash_,: he reminded himself.

At least now he didn't have to worry about the angel arm, he could counter it, but it was a relief not to have to worry about it.

Until Knives went and got his gun back anyway. He hadn't thought of that one when he'd left them out there in the desert. It was supposed to have been a symbolic gesture, him turning his back on the past and embracing the future but now that he thought about it, it probably had not been such a very grand idea after all... anyone could pick up those guns and who knew what kind of impact they might have on a normal human being.

:_Too late now_,: he thought in annoyance.

He was already halfway around the world and he wasn't turning back to go pick up his weapons. He still wanted to get this done as soon as possible, he could swing by and pick it up on his way in. Provided that Knives had not beaten him to it.

"I'm going to take a nap," he announced to the room at large in a tone that said that he did not want to be disturbed. He stood and exited.

Milly tried not to betray how concerned she felt. It was something of a concern that Vash wasn't even _trying _to act upbeat, there were none of his usual shenanigans; no goofing off, no fake smiles, no scarfing down donuts, he wasn't even trying to flirt with Jessica (who was very obviously flinging herself at him)... he was really worried about Meryl. Well, Milly was worried too, especially after they'd gotten that finger delivered to them.

:_That wasn't very nice of Mister Knives_,: Milly thought angrily.

Meryl had never done anything to the man personally except maybe inspect Vash's work on his bandages to make certain they were done correctly and provide shelter and food so he could heal up. They'd never once spoken face to face, and he had ordered one of his Gung-Ho Gun strange-persons to abduct them by force and start sending back missing body parts to goad Vash into doing what he wanted. It was all so _wrong_!

:_And it should have been me_,: Milly thought with mixed feelings.

The tiny, tiny selfish part of her that was a little glad not to be held captive by a madman having her fingers cut off was vastly overshadowed by the part that was worried for her friend and wishing she were safe and out of harms way.

The abductor had originally grabbed onto Milly, it should have been _she _that was taken. But Sempai, always true to form, had leapt into the fray and interposed herself between Milly and anything that might harm her. The look on her face and been feirce and angry, a regular queen Boudica to destroy anything or anyone who might bring harm to those under her protection. Instead it had been Meryl that had been taken, Meryl that had her finger cut off, and was now enduring who knew what kind of treatment at the hands of an enemy that wasn't even hers.

:_Mister Knives said that he'd give her back unharmed_,: Milly tried to console herself.

But really how good was the word of a man who would send highly trained assassins after his own twin brother? Milly always tried to think the best of everyone, but she really couldn't forgive the man for three factors; one that he should treat his own family in such a manner grated right down to the bone for Milly who placed love for her family before nearly anything. She tried to imagine herself doing any of the sorts of horrible things that Knives had done to his brother and she knew that she'd sooner cut off all of her limbs! Secondly was the way he had obviously treated Meryl... she was probably trapped alone in a miserable cell somewhere chained up possibly hurt...

:_The worst part is not knowing_,: Milly thought to herself.

She thought it was probably the same for Vash, the simple mystery of how exactly she was being treated and the very tenuous promise of her safe return were obviously powerful goads for him, they certainly were for her.

And the third thing she couldn't forgive him for was... Nicholas. Milly had never been entirely certain of the extent of his involvement in matters, not even at the end; she'd been more concerned with the person he _was _rather than with his reasons for sticking around with them. She'd known he was a good man inside and that he actually really _was _their friend, just as she'd known that he was aware of a larger part of the puzzle than herself and sempai had known of. It hurt her inside to know that he'd been planted there by someone who had wanted to hurt Vash but not kill him. On one hand it was good that Knives hadn't wanted Vash dead, and on the other hand she felt sorry for what she knew Mister Wolfwood had to have gone through, the divided loyalties and the pain of having to hide things from people whom she was certain he would have liked to call friend.

:_He even visited once_,: she thought to herself.

It had been in what she and Sempai privately called "the interim year," the time spent in limbo in December City between the events at Augusta and the time they'd been recalled to active field duty to go and hunt down mister Vash at Little Jersey. He'd dropped in while Meryl had been taking some very rare personal time to "go and visit a family member." Milly didn't know where she had gone or which family member she had been going to see as she was rather tight-lipped about it, but Milly had seen the worry in sempai's eyes after she'd gotten back. Wolfwood claimed to have been passing through on the way to run an errand for his orphanage and the two had spent the day together catching up, reminiscing a little and she'd treated him to ice cream. It had been good to see him again.

:_You don't drop in and share the day with someone you don't consider a friend_,: she thought.

So in her mind, no matter what his other duties might have been Nicholas D Wolfwood was at least a friend to them in her book. She simply couldn't believe anything less of him.

:_And I certainly do believe **more **of him_,: she thought to herself.

However his death had happened, Milly just knew deep in her heart that he had died trying to help them, perhaps even save them. He was simply too close to them, too close to _her _to have done otherwise. She also knew that his making her promise to wait right there until he got back had been his way of trying to keep her safe and out of danger. Maybe he had actually intended to come back alive, it was hard to say for sure.

Milly turned her thoughts away from the pain in her chest that happened whenever she thought of him. Perhaps in a little while it wouldn't hurt so much but right then, with everything else piled atop it, thinking of him was just too much.

* * *

Her eyes met his and she knew instantly against all logic and without being entirely certain _why _she knew... but she _knew _that the person standing before her was _not _Nicholas D Wolfwood. It _looked _like him, but it didn't move like him, talk like him or act like him.

:_He has golden eyes_.:

She _knew _those eyes. Last time she had seen them, she'd been held in the terrifying merciless mind-grip of a killer. She felt his cold presence invading the last inner sanctum that every person has, wrapping around her body in an implacable grip like bands of ice-bitten steel. Meryl had never been so utterly helpless and terrified in all of her life, including the time she had witnessed the events at Augusta and the time she'd watched her father slowly fade inch by inch.

:_It's his voice and his eyes but that's not his body, how is this possible_?: she wondered to herself from where she stood frozen in shock.

~**_look harder_** ~

The mental command came from a source she both did and did not recognize, and they weren't so much words as the _idea _of taking a closer examination.

:_Let it not be said that I'm one the turn down good advice_,: she thought, even though she knew deep down that she often did ignore good advice when she was concentrated on a goal.

She switched her sight back into othersight and examined the doppleganger of her dearly departed friend Wolfwood standing before her with every evidence of a sombre sort of smugness. She got the feeling that Legato Bluesummers was not a man to spend much time smiling and that when he did smile it caused little puppies to run away.

She saw the two very different kinds of dan'tien again, the one that was centered in the forehead where the mind was most powerful was golden and blue and had strands wrapped out along the weaker red and orange meridians centered in the source and heart like some kind of parasitic tree root. The other meridians centered in the Source and the heart were very obviously weaker; they looked like thin strand of gossomer mist next to the meridians caging them in, but they were nonetheless very clearly struggling. They were wrapping about like tentacles, trying to escape the bonds placed on them by a more powerful consciousness.

:_There's another person in there_!: Meryl realized, almost with a start.

This life of hers was just getting weirder and weirder. First, all of that other nonsense, and now there was a person that had two distinct souls trying to occupy one body. It should be completely impossible but Meryl could see it with her own senses. The one in the head was very clearly trying to cage in the consciousness and meridians that could only have been the original host consciousness.

:_I don't know how he did it, and if anyone had ever asked me before I would have told them he was crazy, but Legato Bluesummers has somehow managed to take his consciouness and meridians and... and transfer them to another body_!:

Now that she had accepted the impossible as reality, Meryl was finding a number of things that were starting to make a little more sense. It would explain why Legato was so eager to die... if he hadn't been _actually _throwing his life away for his master, but had in fact been executing one more step in Knives' master plan to bring his brother to heel, then the fact that he had gone to such great lentgths to force Vash to kill him actually made a very sick, twisted kind of _sense_.

:_I'll bet that a **lot **of things Legato does make a kind of sick twisted sense_,: she thought with wry, frightened, irreverent humor.

He had probably needed someone that was either mostly dead or had died so very recently that their flesh was still warm to take over. Instinct told her that while Legato was jumping from his own body into a new one he needed one that was in a weakened mental state, one that was about equal to his own in order to take over.

:_There is still a Source in there, and there are still meridians trying to fight him off, that must mean that despite the circumstances Mister Wolfwood is still **alive **in there_.:

Well _that _changed things. Meryl's hastily-contructed new plan had been to blast him with a zap-grid then beat him over the head with something hard a few times to make sure he stayed down then she would have grabbed Miss Remembrance and ran like hell. She couldn't let _this _remain the way it was though...

Meryl's mind took her back to the nights she'd listened to her best friend muffle her quiet sobs into her pillow, very obviously trying not to wake her up. The few times Meryl had tried to come over and comfort her Milly had gently sent her back to bed saying she'd be fine in the morning. Meryl hadn't known what else she should do but respect her friends wishes and let her grieve how she wanted to, lord knew Meryl had never been one to accept pity and when she'd been grieving her own fathers death she'd never liked having anyone around to see her weakness, so she could honor Milly's determination to put on a strong front. Despite all of that, Meryl hated knowing that Milly was hurting and there was nothing she could do about it.

:_Now it seems that there is something I **can **do about it_,: Meryl thought optimistically.

She walked forward with her hands held up above her head, all the while keeping her eyes steadily on that poor Legato in Wolfwood's clothing. She was studying the invading dan'tien and how the meridians flowed in its host body. She couldn't afford to act right away, certainly not without gathering as much information as she could beforehand, because when Meryl did strike she was going to get only _one _chance, and the results of failure on her part were not to be thought of. The very idea of herself in the grip of a powerful mind-predator who knew what she was and could take over her channels and use them made an icy cold terror spread out from her core and shiver with real fear. Meryl prided herself on not being afraid of much, but _that _was something that had the power to terrify her.

-_So good to see you again_,- Legato said into her mind directly. -_We met only breifly once before and I was rather busy at the time, but I'm quite certain that the Master would not mind us becoming closer aqquainted.-_

:_ew. ew. ew._: Meryl thought unable to supress a shudder.

The feeling of the thought tendril stroking inside of her mind like the smooth scaly, sinuous body of a snake cause a gut reaction of revulsion and fear. The presence focused on her, trying to work its way inside of her was... just _wrong_. It was indefinable, but Meryl felt a definate sense of wrongness there, like looking in the eyes of a hungry feral dog and knowing that it thinks it's just found its next meal. And worst of all was that expression on the face of a man whom she trusted.

:_And that just... **pisses me off**_!: Meryl thought inside her mind.

She could see by the wild, almost frantic ways that the red merdidians coiling out from the Source dan'tien were writhing and struggling against the blue and gold that Meryl was not the only one that felt that way. She imagined that what was left of one Nicholas D. Wolfwood was probably none too happy with the situation either.

:_Even worse for him_,: she thought with real pity. :_He probably thinks that I think that he's the real deal and that he's either a traitor or a puppet for Knives. He doesn't know I can See him so he's probably trying to find a way to warn me, or at least let me know he's not doing this of his own free will_.:

Well at least that meant that she'd have help when the time came.

-_The manacles, please_?- Legato ordered a nearby henchman.

Meryl meekly presented her wrists for shackeling and allowed another chain to be locked around her waist and chained to the metal stake pounded into the floor. The other henchmen were already setting the campground to rights as Legato gave out mental orders to the people under his command.

Remembrance tried to say something to her when she first sat down but Meryl gave a shake of her head and a warning look. It would be best if she were silent for now. Meryl simply sat down and stared at him intently, observing and memorizing the way his meridians worked. She'd watch for now, and wait until he fell asleep. Then would be her time to strike.

* * *

**Kyaaa! (reveiws are love, please love me?)**


	46. Choices, Consequences and Responsibility

The Black Cairn was located directly on the equator, along the energy-pathway that he could sense intersected with all of the other energy paths, it was this path he intended to use to gain control of all of them. It wasn't on one of the great nodes, they had all already been taken by the Gaea Device but he figued he didn't need a great node to take control of the device; if he could take control of the of the meridian that tied them all together he could exert influence on the rest of them through the unifying channel. He would be like a man setting fire to the center of a spiderweb; his influence would spread outward along the channels that interconnected throughout the world, burning away the impure purpose the web that been designed for and making it anew to carry his own mission.

As an object, it was lacking in visual elegance; the cairn was a large black spire thrusting up from the middle of a blasted out crater. The crater and the detritud surrounding it were remains of Lost July, the goround zero of the actions of his traitorous brother. All he had wanted back then was a reunion with his brother after many years of being separated, a reunion without her memory hanging over them. Why couldn't Vash see that Knives was the one who cared for him? Why did he continue to deny him? Why couldn't he just see that Knives wanted what was best for thier kind? The time of the humans had come and gone and there was a new, superior race to inherit the world.

All that was left of what had once been a thriving human ant-colony nestled around thier kin was a great glassed-over bowl-shaped depression int he middle of a barren, wind-scoured wasteland. Knives had chosen this place as a fitting place for his triumph, the place that had been his downfall... he was nothing if not persistent.

Out of the bottom of the heat-blasted crater a cylindric spire of blackened stone all of a peice, the stone of the spire a single flowing black stone that shone darkly even in the light of day. It was smooth, like shadow made stone, and it glistened darkly in the light of day. Knives had taken over the ruins of what should have been his triumph and decided that, because of its ideal position, it would make the perfect place to stage his greatest triumph. The spire of black plant-glass, a result of his and his brothers combined Angel Arms resonating and releasing massive amounts of energy. he'd discovered early on that using the special energy that his plant abilities granted him, created and unusual substance (the same one he'd put in Vash's and his own longcolts). Over the years he'd taken the black-glass crater and the cairn inside of it and modified it for the purpose he intended. It was still all one peice but Knives thought of it as three separate parts; the hollowed cavern under the base, the middle chamber, and the area at the very tip. The base of the spire widened out the closer it got to the bottom of the crater, hidden away in the depths of the spire, underneath the surface, was a great, round hollowed-out chamber where all of his human sacrifices would go. He'd calculated the amount of energy it would take to seize control of the main meridian, and then sent his most loyal servant out to go collect enough humans to provide the power needed, as an advantageous side effect, he had also been able to hound his brother with thier dissappearances as well. Legato had had to clear out nearly the entire Souther Cornelia Region. Those captives life-energy would go to fuel the initial push that would enable him to twist the control of the meridians away from its original purpose and place its power soley in his hands.

Slightly above the center of the spire was a very small hollowed-out chamber, only large enough for a single man to stand in. There was only one way to acccess the chamber and that was through the floor of it, there was no stair going round the outside nor was there a door leading in and out. There was a single hollowed-out shaft running from the hollwed cavern of sacrifices in the bottom to the channels chamber in the center all the way up to the keystones pedestal where he would be waiting to receive the power at the tip.

At the tip of the black cairn, the spire was flattened out awaiting the final peices that would complete it. The pedestal that was made of blackened plant-glass, the same substance that he had placed in the hidden chamber in thier twin colts, the same stone that enabled them to crudely channel the power they accessed through their gates, that stone pedestal was meant for him to use in conjunction with that stubborn creature he was currently taming and the keystone that his dear brother was currently gathering. The spire would collect and conduct the life energy from the humans in the Cavern of Sacrifices and conduct that energy thrugh the hollow shaft, like water pumped through a pipe, into the channels chamber, where the creature he would have tamed to his will by then would refine the energy and twist it to Knives' purposes before sending it on to the tip to bestow upon Knives his rightful power. Then Knives would use that energy to unlock the power of the keystone and take command of the meridians. Then... Eden.

It was all starting to come together and Knives tried not to feel either smug about his inevitable success or worried that the loose ends were starting to unravel a little, ever so slowly. Perhaps he should check on that useless servant of his to make certain that all went according to his will. But he would wait until after he had seen his pedestal safely installed at the cairs tip, it wouldn't do to be careless now.

* * *

Vash found himself back out on his blanket again, in the middle of nowhere, alone. He naturally sat up and looked around him, seeing again to his left the darkened, black, cloud-lowered sky that dripped with menace and... nothing. His shoulders slumped in disappointment. He had wanted to go back into Meryls garden again, it seemed that there was a sense of peace coupled with a sense of purposeful detirmination that permeated the air of that place, it was such a nice place to spend his time in. Rem didn't show up anymore to comfort him and being stuck out in the middle of no-where by himself didn't sound very relaxing at all, he wanted that garden back! And he was curiuous about the mystery of Meryl's silver apples... he just knew that they had to mean something! He'd woken up partially healed that morning and he was dead certain that it wasn't a coincidence.

:_So boring_...: he thought to himself in annoyance at finding himself with his own company.

He knew what the shadowy place on the horizon meant, Vash might not have bothered staying in mental comminucation with his brother over the years, but their twin bond, sick twisted thing that it had become, was still there. Knives was over there and Vash knew that if he walked over to that dark place he would be with his brother Knives, but he feared that if he did so, Knives would attempt to trap him there and not let him return to his own mind, so Vash had always kept so much dry. killing desert between them that for Knives to attempt to cross it would be near-suicide. Vash would have loved to have been able to say with confidence that he was a match for his brother, but on the feild of psychic manipulation it simply was not so, and he was afraid that if Knives ever got more of a hold on him than he had already that Vash would be kept a prisoner within his own mind, unable to act while Knives went out and destroyed the world. He would have liked to have reached out to his twin, to get through the rage and pain and coldness that characterized his mindscape to reach his brother, but he was too afraid of what Knives might do if Vash exposed any vulnerabilities to him.

"And that's where the real tragedy of this mess is," his own voice said from behind him.

Vash didn't even have to turn his head to know who or what had spoken with him. He did anyways, just because it was weird and facinating talking with himself.

Now Vash in his dream wasn't in his usual gear of Vash the Stampede, he just wore a button-up and dungarees with his hair sticking out every which way. Crimson Diablo wore a slightly darker, almost purple-red version of his former coat with two large black angel wings poking up over his shoulders that had a deep red sheen to them in the light. His hair was spiked up but not quite like Vash's had been, it seemed more wild somehow. His eyes were entierly without pupil or iris, a deep red in color and frankly it creeped Vash out just a little.

"Why do I get _you_?" Vash grumbled to himself.

"You get me, or rather, _us _since I am in fact a part of you, you get me because you can finally handle me. See, back in the good ol' days when your only war was with your brother, you got Rem becuse she was what you needed. She was your security blanket, murmurning soft, uncomplicated nothings in your ears because you needed to hear such things at the time, you needed things simple and you needed something you could believe in unquestioningly."

Vash felt insulted at the slightly condescending way that his words were coming out but was tutted before he could defend his mentor.

"And I'm not saying that's a bad thing. Maybe it's overly-simple, blind and idealistic, but really, if no-one ever tries to change the world and everyone just accepts it as the way things are nothing will ever get better and no-one will ever change. To live a life trying to make things better for everyone while harming no-one isn't a bad way to live."

Vash's eyebrows rose, surprised at hearing something like that from what was supposed to be the darker side of him.

"That said, it isn't always a good way to live either. Sometimes people need harm to come to them, just a little, in order to grow. So I've got a question for you... you spared your brother's life, why?"

"I wanted to save him," Vash said sadly, looking across the horizon to the dark blot in the distance.

"Lofty goals, lousy execution," his doppleganger said to him. "Besides, you can't save him when you're still afraid of him. Men like that can smell weakness and Knives goes for the jugular every time. Like he did when he took our girl, granted it could have as easily been Milly and then you'd have had to stop Meryl from hounding him down and tearing him apart limb from limb."

"I hardly think-" he protested, objecting to Crimsons portrayal of Meryl as a blood thirsty valkyrie vengeance-goddess.

"Oh-ho, you think not?" Crimson said, looking genuinely amused. "You know what a temper she's got, our short girl. You doubt for a moment that she'd be above hunting down the guy who made off and then harmed someone under her protection then meting out the punishment she feels he deserves. See that's where we're a little different, you and I, I think that Knives should have gotten a little more of the rough treatment from us for all the shit he's put us through."

"An eye for an eye leaves both parties half-blind," Vash replied, upholding the moral high-road as he always did.

"Okay, in most circumstances you're right... maybe. But with Knives, I mean come on, the guy just wont give up! Besides there's a point I want to make that I think is very important. There's one major flaw with you always being the only one to take on your brother and that's the fact that you always go easy on him."

"Easy?" Vash said, feeling a little miffed. "I blew away most of his body in July, how is that going easy on him? I shot him not once, not twice but four times in our last meeting, how is that going easy on him?"

"The first was almost entirely an accident and the second was just to incapacitate him so you could drag him home. Neither one adressed the issue."

"So what the hell is the issue then?" Vash asked.

"Choices, concequences and responsibility."

Crimson flopped down on the blanket and nodded to the other side and the two of them stretched out together on their backs, looking up at the endless blue of the sky.

"For better or worse people make thier own choices, men like Knives especially, and choices stem from internal motivations. You already know what his are."

"Yeah, death, destruction, eternal suffering... it's just that, he's so afraid. He spends every day of his life in the world in such a morass of fear and hatred that it's no wonder he lashes out at everyone," Vash said sympathetically. "He's afraid that he and our sisters will be used until we're all used up. We're supposed to be immortal. or so long lived that it makes no difference, and yet, because of the way we have to support humanity in this world the bulb-kin have been slowly dieing one by one. He's terrified of it."

And how, exactly does that make any difference at all in his actions?" Crimson questioned next.

"Well his actions are his owns, but you yourself said that they stem from intent. I understand his motivations, he's afraid and that fear twists around inside of him into anger that hardens into an enraged hatred for all of humanity, whom he perceives as hurting our sisters with a parasitic relationship. I wanted to save him, I wanted to rescue him and show him the people that I saw; fragile, hopeful loving fighting passionate humans. I wanted to free him from his fear and his pain. I wanted my brother back with me. I... I still love him."

It's sad," Crimson agreed sympathetically. "But really, what does it change?"

"Well, he's back in the saddle again, so to speak, so... Nothing, I guess," Vash said sadly.

"You might feel sorry for him. You might want to help him, but I think in the end, that with the way you've chosen to do things, you've done him a disservice."

"A disservice? Whats that?" Vash asked curiously.

"It's a matter of choices consequences and responsibility. Knives has made his choices, no matter what his motives, no-one has forced him down the road he's on, rather the reverse in fact. He's made his choices and hasn't had to face the consequences of them. You've been so diligently keeping him and the threat he poses to humanity a secret because you think that he's only your burden to bear, but in doing so you've not only endangered the people you would protect, but you've denied him the opportunity to understand and take responsibility for his own actions. You've been protecting him from the consequences of his own actions."

Vash paused, realizing that Crimson actually had a point. But...

"If I told people about him and they tried to take him on, they'd only get hurt. I have to protect them from Knives. Besides, if they attacked, regardless of whether he'd struck first, Knives would only feel justified in doing what he wants."

"One... he's going to do what he wants anyway, he's already proven that. Two... I think you underestimate humanities ingenuity and drive to fight and survive. Three... That may or may not be your decision to make, they at least have the right to know that there is a threat to them and that they have to guard against it. If Knives had ever truly wanted to take you out, and he managed it, the people you protect would have been completely blindsided by him and how is that fair?"

Vash paused for a moment to digest his points and had to concede that he might be right on a few of them, but in the end

"I don't feel I made the wrong decision," Vash maintained. "Violence begets more violence and if the humans were made aware that he was a threat to him, they'd have reacted just like he did, out of fear, and there would have been an endless cycle of hatred-fueled interactions between Knives and humans. At least if they don't know he's a threat I have the hope that I can reach him and make him see the best in people without his worrying that they're going to turn a witch hunt on him."

"Again, by interfereing you're denying him the consequences of his actions. In essence he has made you complicit in his quest to destroy the very thing you want to protect."

"But-" Vash protested, but Crimson overrid him.

"He never is made to answer for what he does, not to the people he hurts and not even to you, and so he thinks he can do whatever he wants and no-one can stop him or take him to task for it."


	47. Resolve

She was ravenous. At the best of times the calling and casting of so many grids in such rapid succession would have taken it out of her, and these weren't the best of times. She was newly come in to her abilities, she'd spent much of that morning practicing on using her powers already and so was still a little worn from that, and to top it off she'd been traveling for days through the desert and had still been recovering from over straining her resources earlier. The adrenaline pumping through her system when she'd set out to rescue Remembrance had defrayed the cost of using the grids so frequently, in fact during the middle of the fight when she'd still been hidden by the smokescreen making lights dance in and out of the mists, blowing up random bits of turf here and there and rendering people unconscious with an act of will alone Meryl had felt... powerful. It had given her a feeling of almost invincibility. Part of that could have been due to adrenaline, but her ability to confuse, toy with, and knock out her opponents had given her a victors high, like there was nothing she couldn't smash her way through. It had quickly worn off though, when the situation had changed itself and now that the buzzing feeling of adrenaline was fading from her system Meryl felt every bit of that defrayed cost. Her stomach clenched in on itself, feeling like she hadn't eaten in days and the lack of sugar and nourishment in her bloodstream was making her vision grey around the edges (that had nothing to do with switching Sights) there was a steady throb across her temples and Meryl was beginning to wonder if she was ever going to get rid of the lingering headache that came from channeling the power from a Source-stone.

"Are you okay?" Remembrance whispered to her as Meryl slumped exhaustedly against the side of the cave and closed her eyes against the headache.

"I need food," Meryl replied. "And water." She didn't have the energy to say anything else.

The guards had their guns pointed suspiciously at the two of them like they'd be making plans for an escape.

"I'll see if I can get one of the guards to feed us. You look done in."

Meryl nodded faintly as Remembrance went to see what she could do about getting some food for her. Their captor must have been feeling generous (or perhaps he had drugged it) but one of the guards returned fairly quickly with a plate full of food from the stewpot set up over the fire for the two of them. Remembrance thanked them and offered one plat to Meryl who weakly took it from her.

"Do you need me to help feed you?" she asked solicitously.

Meryl shot her a look that could have felled avians in mid-air and with exaggerated dignity took up the spoon and tucked in. Far too quickly the ration was gone.

"Here you can have mine," Remembrance said, seeing her plate was empty and Remembrance hadn't taken more than a few bites.

"You have to eat to keep up your strength," Meryl replied shortly, even though her stomach protested her refusal (the plateful had taken the edge off the hunger but she was by no means satisfied).

"I'm so nervous and scared I can't eat!" she confessed in a timid tone. "I can't see how you can just sit there calmly while they point guns at us. What if one of them goes off?"

"Better hope it misses?" Meryl suggested with a dry attempt at humor. "But I guess I can see your position. If this were my first time being held up like this i'd be nervous too I guess. Are you sure you're not going to eat that?"

"It's all yours," Remembrance said, handing it over. Meryl didn't wait to be told a third time, she tucked right in to the food, her stomach telling her that refilling it was more important right then than any action bunch of gun-toting weirdoes might make in the near future. She still had all of her Source-stones so whether these guys knew it or not, they weren't really the ones in charge. She was just waiting around until she could think of a way to get everyone out of there safe.

:_Waaaiitaminit_...: Meryl thought freezing abruptly over the last bite of a rapidly vanishing pile of food as a thought struck her.

:_Who exactly does this remind me of_?: she thought with a dawning sense of horrified amusement.

One lone person charges into a hostage situation with nothing more than their talent and wits and expects by sheer dint of native talent to win out without anyone getting hurt.

Meryl looked around her at all the blackened charred spots from her explosions going off and the growing file of persons injured by friendly fire (though there were no deaths thankfully). There was a rather large mess where she'd blown up a pile of crates. Meryl mentally superimposed the scene with one of the little towns she'd had to assess damages on one time and slumped down, resting her chin on one hand.

And she'd been far more interested in feeding her face as soon as she found a minute than in those people who were nominally holding her captive. It was like thier first meeting all over again only in reverse.

"Oh. My. God." She muttered to herself, shaking her head in disbelief.

"What's wrong Miss Meryl?" Remembrance asked in concern.

"I was just reminded of something unpleasant," she mumbled dryly.

"Oh," Remembrance said a little blankly. There was a long pause and then she said in a tiny, frightened little voice

"What are we going to do now Meryl?"

Meryl blinked, for a moment it had been like she'd had Milly right there beside her.

:_Wow, she's like Milly Number Two_!: she thought for a moment.

Only, she didn't have a stungun. And she wasn't actually her junior partner. And she didn't seem the sort to know how to take a bandit situation, but Meryl had to give the young woman props for not sitting in the sand crying in fear. She had courage where it counted. Meryl decided that she was going to trust her and treat her as a temporary substitute partner.

"Don't worry," she said briskly. "For now we wait and save our strength. I have to figure out a way to sneak attack the man in the shuttle."

"But there's guards and men with guns everywhere and we're chained up," Remembrance pointed out.

After a long moment for Meryl to reflect on it she said.

"I can melt the firing mechanisms in the guns so they won't fire, what we have to worry about it their numbers and more importantly that guy who's controlling them. Not everything here is what it seems to be."

"What do you mean Miss Meryl?" Remembrance asked curiously.

"This is going to sound crazy, but the person who seems to be controlling them isn't actually our enemy."

"That's strange, it sure seems like he doesn't mean us any good," Remembrance mumbled.

"It's a long story," Meryl said. "But it doesn't look like we're going anywhere now, and I think we could both use the rest and a distraction so I'll tell you the basics. It all started when my partner at Bernardelli's, Milly Thompson, and I were assigned to chase down an infamous outlaw gunman..."

Meryl went on to relate the tales of her assignment. She carefully didn't actually mention his _name_, but anyone who had lived on Gunsmoke would be able to clue out who Meryl was talking about, especially after the allusion to Augusta. She didn't say what she and Milly had been doing there of course, only that she and her assignement had been separated and she'd later been recalled home for a year. She left a _lot _of the details out, things that Vash had told her in confidence mostly, and those events that she felt had no bearing on thier present circumstances. She didn't actually know much about the telepath, Legato, only mostly what Vash had told her and what she had sensed about him in the sole instance she had met him, but since it had a direct bearing on their current predicament, Meryl told Remembrance everything she knew about him and her own observations.

"So your friend, who seems to have had a relationship with your other friend, was supposed to have died, really gets taken over by this other telepath who is a Jumper-"

"What's a Jumper?" Meryl interjected.

"I have read documented cases where a very strong telepath could jump from mind to mind while still retaining their integral personality, though I've never read about one that was strong enough to take over the person who's mind he jumped into. Given all of the other mischief he seems to have caused I guess its not a huge stretch of the imagination."

"Sounds complicated," Remembrance said after Meryl finished her brief summary of events (relegating Vash to "my assignment").

"That's why I think waiting and observing, _then _striking, might be the best way to go in this situation. I don't want to hurt my friend, likewise I don't want to end up prey to a telepath either."

"_You, _in particular, have to be careful Miss Meryl," Remembrance cautioned her. "Because you resonate with Psi-waves, and that's what a telepath emits in strength in order to use his powers, you're particularly vulnerable to psychic attack. He could take you over and force you to resonate with him, take over your channels and use them for his own ends and you wouldn't be able to stop him."

"Which is why I need to get the jump on him," Meryl said stubbornly, even though her stomach clenched and went cold with fear at the thought of someone taking her over.

"I'll sneak up on him, grab hold of his meridians, essentially pulling the rug out from under his feet, untangle him from Mister Wolfwood and burn him out of there for good."

Meryl didn't say the rest of what she was thinking because she knew Miss Remembrance would surely censure her for it. When you looked at it on the surface Meryl's plan seemed harmless enough, rescue a good friend by getting rid of the energy patterns feeding on theirs like some kind of parasitic strangler fig was a _good _thing, but Meryl saw the other side to it... when she burned Legato's meridians out of the place he had transferred himself she would essentially be _killing _him. When she removed the thing that made his consciousness exist in this world and destroyed it, even though all she was doing was dissipating the energy of his meridians into her own functions, she would be using the thing that made him exist and he would be no more. She was, in effect planning on erasing him.

:_Or would that be... I mean he is **already **dead. Vash shot him in the head and I burned his body. All he is now is some kind of psychic-parasite living off the life-energy of others. I'd be doing society a favor, because really, how the hell could Vash be expected to hunt him down and kill him? Aside of the fact that he's a devout pacifist and killing him the first time really messed him up for a while. Well this is a fine mess to find myself in_,: she thought in annoyance.

Well, she couldn't afford to let her concerns over the ethics of an unethical situation keep her from doing what obviously needed to be done. if she didn't erase Legato from mister Wolfwood then that was the same as letting him do what he wanted. She had a sense of having only a small window of opportunity to act, and that if she didn't the consequences would be dire not just for her but for everyone else. Legato was Knive's number one henchman after all, and Knives had already proven that he did not have her interests at heart. Quite the opposite in fact. No, this was her task to do and her burden to bear if it came to that. She might not like it, but the world was full of things that a person didn't like. If she did nothing and was hurt because of it, or worse if Remembrance or Milly were hurt because of her inaction she didn't know if she could live with that. It would be best to _resolve _herself to the matter.

"Try not to worry too much," Meryl said trying to be reassuring. "Just rest here for now, I'll let you know when it's time to move."


	48. Hangover

"Ohh..." he moaned faintly. His head hurt! He'd had headaches and some fairly sizable hangovers in his life, but this topped them all to the power of ten.

Through the fog that seemed to surround him his was vaguely aware that his feet were being dragged behind him and he was hanging between two people, his weight supported on his arms. he wasn't able to wake up completely and he drifted in and out helplessly, aware only that he was being taken somewhere.

"Almost there..." a familiar voice whispered.

He knew that he _knew _who it belonged to but he just couldn't place it. His mind was working so slow!

There was the rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire and the two people supporting him abruptly dropped to the ground. His head throbbed and he blacked out for a minute. When he came to again he was still being dragged.

"There's Angelina," a familiar voice said off to his right.

He _knew _that voice! But he just could not place it nor why it seemed like he knew it or should know it. His head felt heavy and his mind still wrapped in a thick cotton fog and his thoughts were still tangled and trying to sort themselves out. He tried going back to the last thing he remembered but his scattered thoughts wouldn't assemble into any workable coherency. As for trying to order his limbs, it was a hopeless case so he had no real choice but to let whoever that familiar person was drag him wherever it was that they were going.

His head slumped forward again and his blacked out once more. He wasn't sure how much later it was when the dreamless sleep slowly faded and dissolved around him leaving him in a state of disbelieving consciousness. His thoughts felt a little clearer and his head seemed a little less fuzzy... it still ached like the dickens but it was lesser than it had been. In fact his headache had lessened just enough to let him feel that every other part of him ached in a deep bone-cold ache, like he'd spent the night sleeping out in the cold on a rock with no blankets only there was a strange stinging feeling like the slight burn of aftershave accompanying the aching feeling that he couldn't quite explain.

:_There's a lot of things I can't explain_: he thought vaguely.

The only thing he could be certain of right then was that he was slumped up against the rough, cool stone wall and it was very dark around him except for one bright spot of pure white light somewhere above him. There were people moving around him without speaking but he couldn't seem to identify them. He was so incredibly tired! He felt like someone had wrung every single last tiny bit of strength out of him like a housewife might wring out a dishrag.

"Why did they all turn on us, Miss Meryl?" one voice, and unfamiliar one, asked in the semi-dark. "I thought you said you got rid of the person controlling them."

"I did," the familiar voice replied in a hushed tone. "All I can surmise about those bandits Legato was controlling is that once they were let off the leash they decided to go back to doing what bandits do. He might have been using them for his own ends, but that telepath was also keeping them in check, once the cat is away the mice will decide to play."

"Too bad they decided to try and play with us," the second voice said.

Valuable as the information was, if he could make sense of it, he really wished that those women would just stop talking... he had a horrible headache and the noise, however hushed, was only making it worse.

At least he could remember his name now! He wasn't drawing a complete blank, but there were a lot of fuzzy grey areas in his mind whenever he tried to prod his memory into filling in the back-story. The last really, truly clear memory he had was of gazing in the darkness at the soft moonlight falling on a beloved face, the sweet unguarded sleeping face of a woman. He remembered her name... Milly. Just about everything else in his mind was pretty fuzzy but that stood out with crystal clarity.

He knew that the most recent situation he had been in had not been a good one, and had not been on he'd liked. He couldn't remember it but he could tell there was some pretty heavy badness about it by the way his mind so very quickly shied away from it every time he tried to recall what had just happened to him. He was content enough for now to simply let himself not remember he could worry about it later what was important right then was getting someplace safe.

Nicholas D. Wolfwood, for that was his name, tried to move a little bit in order to test his limbs only to discover that he was sore and achy all over. The slight movement made his body twinge in protest and produced from him an involuntary low groaning sound of protest.

"You're awake," the familiar voice said to him.

He knew it wasn't Milly's voice, but he also knew that it was the voice of someone he trusted (and he didn't trust many people). He just couldn't put a name or a face to it.

He tried to say "yes" but all that came out of him was a sounf like "yyeeaarghhhh" as his weight shift a little too far to the right and he slumped over bonelessly to one side. A pair of hands quickly righted him and he found himself staring for the first time into the face of the one who'd gotten him out of whatever terrible situation he'd been in. He recognized the face, it wasn't as dear as the woman in the moonlight, but he closely associated it with her. He wasn't sure why but the intrinsic connection _felt _right. And there should be one more, too...

"Here," she said, pulling out a canteen from her side and brining it to his lips. "You're probably a little disoriented right now, that Legato did quite a number on you as far as I can tell. I don't know how long the effects will last. You're just going to have to trust that we are your friends and we want to help okay?"

Wolfwood didn't _know _why, but he felt some kind of odd tickle of private amusement at hearing her speak that way. There was a gruff stiffness in her tone, even though she was clearly trying to sound helpful and caring. There was also a directness in her gaze and movements that said that she was a little uncomfortable with her assumed role as nurturer. For some reason he found it funny. His chest started spasaming and his shoulders shook then there were littel sounds emerging from his throat and his face contorted of it own accord into a grin. The sounds emerging from his troat got louder until his whole body seemed to shake with mirth.

It was strange, he wasn't sure why but part of that laughter seemed to be nothing but pure undiluted relief. Relief that led to joy about being alive and in one piece and... he wasn't sure what else. All he knew was that he was so _glad_...

"Is he... okay?" a woman off to his left asked dubiously.

"He'll be fine," the lady- what was her _name_?- said in reply. "Let's get going before those guys discover the entrance to this tunnel and come after us."

The headache slammed back into his temples and he groaned involuntarily as the two women picked him up. He was still a little dizzy as it turned out, the world went spinning as he was hauled vertical again he hung on to consciousness this time by a fingernail. He couldn't move on his own, he didn't know where he was or where he was going or what was going on, but he could at least remain conscious for it.

The two women dragged him further down into a dark passageway. His eyes must have been playing tricks on him because he saw a third meber to thier little party and he could have sworn that there were wings sprouting from her back.

:_Must'a hit my head harder than I thought_,: he thought to himself with just a bare edge of humor.

"I'm going to collapse and seal the tunnel behind us," the shorter woman (why couldn't he remember her name!) to his left said.

That was the last thing he knew for a significant slice of time.

* * *

Vash looked around him, they were so far off the map that even he hadn't been there and there weren't a whole lot of places in that world that he hadn't been in his over a century of traveling.

"Are you coming this time Milly?" Vash asked.

"I think I will," she accepted nodding.

He was strangely comforted by her presence, it wasn't the same kind of feeling that he got from having Wolfwood there; with him it had more been the comfort of knowing that someone had his back. Milly definitely wasn't as skilled a gunman as the former priest had been, but she offered a different kind of comfort... she still had his back, maybe she wasn't as good in a fight but she didn't have any divided loyalties and she generally tended to think the same way he did about things. On second thought, maybe that wasn't such a good thing. She'd be just as quick to rush into a fight without thinking because it was the right thing to do. And she'd take things on without thinking of the consequences just the way he would. At least Meryl or Wolfwood had tried to find other ways to get things done first... but neither of them were there (one way or another) so they were following thier own noses into trouble with nothing holding them back.

"I wanna come too!" Jessica exclaimed.

Vash heart, good as it was, sank at the idea. It wasn't that he didn't like Jessica, Vash never liked to think of anyone as a burden but she was an unexpected complication in a situation that was already chancy. He would have much preferred that she hadn't been there. But she was, so he'd just have to deal with it.

"Jess, stay here and guard the ship," Vash replied.

"But!" she protested immediately. "Millys going with you! Why do I have to stay and guard the ship while she gets to go along? It's not fair!"

Vash was half-tempted to say "fairs are for tourists" but held his tongue. Instead, he said

"The reason Milly is going is because of the buddy system," he said with calm logic. "I need the person at my back who knows how to shoot, perform first air, climb rocks and act fast in an emergency situation. I know Milly can do all of those things because I've been traveling with her. There's no telling what we're going to find down there."

She still looked petulant and intractable so Vas pulled out his charm... He stood over her, took her hand and looked deep into her eyes saying

"I just want you to be safe Jessica."

he was a little gratified to see her get woozy, and nod, smiling in a daze. It wasn't often that his very limited cassanova charm worked! He wondered idly if it would make Meryl do the same thing, go all smiley and sweet on him.

:_Probably not_,: he thought sadly after a moment. :_She'd probably just hit me over the head with her other hand and tell me to knock it off and get out of her bubble_.:

Doc decided to stay and keep Jessica (and his precious data) company so he had to give Milly a quick rundown on how to use the data collection devices he pressed on her. Jessica pressed a quickly assembled basket of food for him. He turned to wave cheerfully goodbye to her as He and Milly set out for the site riding on the backs of the tomases. He was borrowing Meryl's beast for the day and was a little surprised at how docile and well-trained it was, it showed not a single sign of fractiousness or rebellion... Meryl had probably spent a good deal of time training it. It was just like her to do so.

The area they had entered was another huge dune-sea, wave after wave of golden beige stretched out along the horizon in every direction making the sky look like an enormous blue bowl that arced over them.

Milly looked around her and didn't see any sort of landmark whatsoever, just wave after rolling wave of sand.

"Gee mister Vash, I don't see anything that looks like what we've seen the last few times. How are we supposed to know where it is?"

"Same way we knew about the others," Vash said, pulling the pyramid-shaped keystone from his pocket and Meryl's pendant from under his shirt. He held the pyramid before him and dangled the pendant near the tip of it, the two of them resonated and then started to glow, then true to form a shadow of light rippled over the keystone and it seemed to hum a little bit. A beam of while light shot out of the tip, pointed directly in front of them. It pointed for a little ways and then simply cut off in the mid-air like a ribbon that had been simply cut, it hung there. There was no object or shadows there to indicate an object the light just... stopped.

"I don't see anything," she remarked, mystified.

Vash held up a finger, signalling that she should be patient. Presently the air began to shimmer, and at first she thought that it was simply heat shimmer, the heat haze of the suns rays striking the sands of the desert and reflecting back heat to make the air currents move but the vague shimmer began to form into a shape.

* * *

**Thanks so much for all of the wonderful reveiws from everyone! You guys really keep my posting. I hope you enjoyed this chapter and lok! At long last! We finally get to hear from mister wolfwood... too bad he's so out of it. Next chapter we get to hear a little bit from Remembrance that'll clear up some, but by no means all of the questions about her that everyone seems to have. Look forward to it please! And don't forget to leave a note telling me if you liked this installment or not.**


	49. Rest

Remembrance had never been so glad to see anyplace before in her life than she had been glad to see the safe interior walls of the little rounded cavern that Meryl had constructed for them to hole up throughout the storm that had passed just a day before. A small collection of those pale little balls of light that Meryl had taught herself to form formed and floated up to the ceiling and a moment later the stone of the entrance archway rippled like the surface of a still pond when a pebble was thrown into it and then smoothed itself over to form into a solid rock wall.

"We'll be safe here for a while," Meryl said, her voice heavy with exhaustion. "It'll take those men a while to organize themselves and decide whether or not it is worth the effort to chase after us."

Remembrance had nothing else she could say to that statement. Meryl seemed to be busying herself making another pallet, most likely to lay the man they had rescued on. Remembrance was just going to have to take Miss Meryl at her word when she said that the person they'd brought with them was their friend. They currently had him leaned against the side of the cavern while they made better arrangements for him.

"Angelina, are you okay?" Remembrance asked of their last party, more out of politeness than because the angel looked like she was having anything other than the usual difficulties that came from being separated from her bondmate for any length of time.

The Angel looked over at her blankly and made a small inquisitive chirruping sound. Remembrance repeated the question, trying to project a feeling of concern for her health and it took a long moment but the Angel seemed to at last grasp what she was trying to communicate, for she fluffed out her wings, smiled her delighted smile, and went to the corner she'd claimed for herself the last time she was there. It wasn't more than a few moments later when the plant angel folded her wings about herself, making a shelter of her feathers. A soft glow emanated from her little nest a moment later as her wings glowed moonlight white and little strands of light began to weave themselves into a cocoon around her, and it wasn't too much longer that the cocoon was finished.

:_If she cannot have her bulb and she cannot have her bondmate, I suppose this must be the next best thing for her_,: Remembrance thought with an internal shrug. It looked like the Angel was tired and needed a rest, Remembrance couldn't blame her.

:_After being kidnapped and dragged to an enemy encampment, then having explosions go off for an unknown reason then rescued by Meryl and having to drag that mans heavy body through an underground labyrinth, I'm feeling more than a little exhausted myself_,: Remembrance thought.

"Miss Meryl, do you mind if I use the bath first?" Remembrance asked.

"Sure, go ahead," Meryl said absently as she tugged and pulled the poor fellow they'd just rescued by one leg. Once Meryl had pulled the man she'd rescued unceremoniously over to an improvised pallet next to the "fire" that she started up again upon entering the cave she simply dumped him there to sleep.

:_Mental note, don't get injured with her around, she'd probably tell me to walk it off or something_,: Remembrance thought to herself partly in jest.

The grid-fed bath still ran hot water and it felt heavenly after the long day she'd just had.

:_I do wonder what kind of messy situation I've stumbled myself into_,: she wondered to herself as she started her soak.

Remembrance was having a hard time keeping up with events and Meryl was clearly reluctant to share everything she knew, se was very obviously holding things back and Remebrance wondered whether it was because she was afraid of something or if she was just naturally reticent. Getting any details out of the woman was like pulling teeth... when she didn't want to share something she simply wasn't going to and that was that. Still, against all odds, Meryl was able to use her channeling abilities (apparently after having had them sealed away inside of her for nearly her entire life). Not only could she use them, but she was good at improvisation; fast on her feet with a good head in a fight. Remembrance admired her ability to fight and defend herself, it was due entirely to her cool head and tactics that they'd all managed to escape. Remembrance felt bad for not being able to do anything, it seemed like she'd gotten the rug pulled out from under her and it had just been one disaster after another after another. She couldn't seem to get her legs under her, and every time it felt like she had gotten a grip on the situation something else had happened to knock her on her butt again.

:_I'll just soak and go to bed, I'm sure I'll feel better in the morning_,: she thought.

Because in the morning they were going to have to figure out a way to rescue Angelina's Bondmate from whoever had taken him. Remembrance had a tracking device that would resonate with his individual frequency but in order to use it, she needed to get to a SEEDs ship with a working access panel. There was no way otherwise that the signal would extend far enough to track him anywhere over the surface of the planet. From what she had heard from Marcus, SEEDs ships with intact and working panels were few and far between on this world, still she had to try. Much as she disliked having to see people behaving so badly, even she was forced to admit that this world brought out some of the worst as well as some of the best in people. She didn't know what purposes Marcus had been taken for, but she could not afford not to conclude that they probably were not for the most noble of ends.

:_His sister definitely seems anxious to have him back with her, though I'm not entirely that it's not because she'll get to lecture him_.:

Remembrance wished she had someone she could talk with, everything had been so strange and difficult lately, she was really feeling at her wits end. Meryl was a tower of strength, but she was also far from approachable and it seemed that she hadn't taken much to Remembrance personally. probably because the young resonant knew that she was responsible for turning her brother into something that wasn't entirely human, thus causing a heretofore unknown enemy to take a sudden and violent interest in him. She probably blamed Remembrance for his kidnapping too.

:_No wonder she doesn't like me_,: Remembrance thought glumly.

Angelina never made sense at the best of times; she didn't seem to understand the concept of living within time very well, thus her grasp of language was nonexistant. When Marcus had been around to translate for her this had not been a barrier, but now that it was just the poor Angel, suffering without her bondmate, trying to understand or communicate with her was impossible.

:_In short, even though there are people around me, I feel alone_,: Remembrance thought to herself.

It wouldn't be so difficult if the world she found herself in then wasn't so... weird. She'd never been in a desert before; she had known that they were hot and dry but those two words to describe her surroundings were much like saying the ocean was wet... sure they were accurate and they worked, but they didn't do the actuality justice. They didn't describe how the ceaseless wind moaned and murmured through the dunes until it seemed like it would drive her mad. It didn't describe the dust that embedded itself in every crevice, mixing with the sweat on her skin and forming into rivulets of caked mud down her body and irritating her. It didn't describe the oppressive heat that wrapped around her body, or the way the sun seemed to beat down on her or the way she froze at night.

:_Two of them... why did there have to be **two **suns; isn't one more than enough in a place like this_?: Remembrance complained to herself.

And the moons, she didn't know if she'd ever get used to looking up and seeing five of them in the sky, it was neat at first but now it just seemed to remind her of the very alieness of the place she was in now.

:_Everything in this place is so familiar and alien at once_,: she thought to herself.

This world had taken bits and peices of the world she knew and was accustomed to and put them in weird places. It was like seeing an umbrella stand propping up a window, or a flatscreen monitor being used to serve drinks on, sure they worked for the purpose but seeing them out to that use was just plain weird. It was like the world she knew had been cut to bits and then thrown in a box with a bunch of other puzzle peices and someone had assembled them in places and paterns that made no sense to her.

:_What kind of place have I gotten myself to_?: Remembrance wondered to herself.

Nothing on this planet was exactly as she'd ever imagined. She had never been to any of the cities that were supposed to be there but Marcus had descibed them in great detail to her, plain houses often made from bits and parts salvaged from the wrecks of the old SEEDs ships huddled around the life-giving plant bulbs that nurtured humanity. Vast areas of wide open desert, between tiny human oases, uncrossable by beast or man, were connected only by the route of huge, cargo and people carrying sand-steamers. Federal Marshals kept the law as much as the law could be kept, bandits ran wild and preyed on anyone and anything that they could. Lengendary stories of famous gunmen and outlaws told and re-told in the various bars and saloons that catered to a weary people.

She hadn't been there that long, and so far she hadn't really been anywhere; she and Angelique had Jumped to this place a little over two stardate months ago, according to her reconing (though she wasn't sure if she hadn't lost a few days here or there in all the confusion) and landed on the dark side of Luna Teritus. They'd taken a shuttle to make atmospheric landfall in the least populated sector and then Angelique had guided them to the place where her then-future bondmate was waiting for her and offered him the choice. He had accepted the option Bonding with Angelique and they had spent the next week or two preparing him for, undergoing and nursing him through his Transition then Bonding him to Angelique and strengthening thier bond. They'd been a Bonded pair for a little over a week when the men had come and taken them. Remembrance had spent she wasn't sure how long it had felt like a long time, locked away in a small two-room prison that looked like the run-down decaying half-torn apart wreckage of something she had felt she should be able to recognize but couldn't recognize. They had fed her through a slot in the door and she'd had access to a bed and a shower but she hadn't been allowed outside and no-one had come when she'd cried for help. She'd been there for days and had been slowly going out of her mind with boredom when she noted an abrupt hissing sound, there had been a dull sickly-sweet smell that she'd tried to identify and then she'd lost consciousness and woken up at Meryls impatient prodding. From there it had been one thing after another.

_:I really don't think I like it here very much_,: she thought to herself.

It was hotter that the surface of the sun, or at least that was how it felt when she tried to walk across the sands. The weather was not so pleasant, the air in the daytime was suffocatingly hot and at night it dropped like a stone down near freezing. The sandstorms were hard enough to flay the skin from a person and so dark that they could block out the light from the sun. A person could easily die out there in the sands, the fact that they had survived at all was something of a miracle in itself and certainly a testament to minkinds drive to perpetuate itself and better its condition.

:_I guess i can only help it along_,: she thought with weary resignation.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow they'd figure out what to do, but for tonight, she was just so tired. she needed a rest.

Remembrance finished off her bath and quickly went to bed, the "fire" was dimmed when she emerged and her traveling companions were all rolled up in what passed for blankets with them. She was asleep nearly as soon as her head touched the pillow, a deep dreamless sleep untouched by anything outside of it until late the next morning.

* * *

:_I've spent more time underground in the past few weeks than I have for most of my adult life_!: Vash thought as he passed through the portal into yet another cave-looking place carved out of the living rock.

And his adult life had been a very long time indeed. For a man like Vash, who had spent such a long time roaming the wide open deserts beneath unrestricted skies, finding his world so very penned in was a bit unsettling. The thought of a ceiling on his life was unsettling enough but added to that sense of enclosure was the very real worry that the weight of all that earth on the boundry above him might collapse it and send it tumbling down on him was not a thought that made him feel very easy in his heart.

He privately was a little disappointed that there was evidence of his Kin, there was no hymn softly sung by their beautiful voices, there were no pillars supporting several of his sisters as they worked out their Great Device. It looked like that was just a special treat to mark his half-way point and to explain some things to him. It was back to the usual challenges for him to figure out himself.

"Mister Vash," Milly said, looking at the strange cave in front of them. "What do you think we're supposed to do now?"

I'm not sure, but I know I'll figure it out, I'm pretty sure that I'm meant to figure it out," he said with utter conviction.

So far the challenges to unlocking the Great Nodes had been something like educational games, each lesson building on the last and expanding on it. He was sure that the puzzles were there to teach him how the Gaea Device worked.

:_Which_,: he thought with a startled, elated reasoning. :_Is more than my brother will know! So even if he does get the Keystone from me, he won't know how to opperate or manipulate the device!:_

The cave was a round circle with a great spike of rock jutting up the middle of it that leveled off at exactly the center in the air, and there was a stone staircase carved into the rocks spiralling outside of it. A beam of white light shone down from a great starburst crystal floating at the very ceiling of the chamber onto the top of the rock spire illuminating a small glittering something on an altar-like pedestal ontop of the spire of rock in the center of the room. At equidistant intervals through-out the room there were small waist high-pedestals, behind which there were rings of light carved into the floor, with small spheres that glowed with a soft white luminence on tiny pedestals inside the circles. The walls behind the glowing rings had small sphere-shaped niches in them. High above the softly glowing rings in the sphere there floated several triangle-shaped glass panels, about the size of an old ships data-pad, that spun lazily in the air in neat little circles.

Vash walked toward the center of the room, intent on mounting the pedestal and taking the keystone down from it. He got within five feet of the rock spire with the stairs around it and was prevented from going any further by a softly glowing barrier that he could not pass no matter how he pressed on it.

:_Nuts, I knew it was just too easy to hope I could simply walk up and take the stupid thing_,: Vash thought, disappointed but resigned.

He got the odd feeling that his filling out these challenges at each Great Node he visited actually had more than the purpose of teaching him the grid, he thought that he might actually be slowly activating the gaea device itself with every Great Node he unlocked and ever peice of the Keystone he collected. Or if not fully activating, then maybe more like bringing it on line so it could be activated later. There was a nascent feeling of power every time he completed a Great Node Challenge a subtle hum in the air around him that said that there was a great power imbuing the very molecules of the place.

"Well, I guess we'll start with what's worked for us in the past," he said with forced cheer to Milly as he walked back to join her by the entrance. "We'll just pick one of these ... whatever they ares to start with and work our way through them."

"But which one?" Milly wondered aloud. Vash smiled wryly and pointed...

"Eeny, meeny, miney, moe..."

She laughed a little, as he'd hoped. Milly had been having a hard time of it lately; first what had happened to Wolfwood (not an easy thing to take for any of them but he knew that Nicholas Wolfwood had had a special affection for Milly and now knew the affection had been returned). She'd just seemed to get her feet back under her when Meryl got taken because of Vash's own trusting stupidity and negligence for his brother. Milly seemed to be wearing even more around the edges now that she didn't have her Sempai around to look out for her in Meryls gruff, no-nonsense style of mothering. He missed it too. Even if it had meant more scoldng than he generally ever heard (Vash's life was anything but sensible, but she managed to take all the craziness that followed him around with some measure of calm. Usually.

They wound up picking the nearest pedestal circle thing to the right. Vash picked the sphere floating inside of the luminent-ring carved in the floor of the cave and placed it in its niche. As predicted, the light seemed to cut into the floor and a circular platform rose up and hovered at about step-height. Vash and Milly stepped up onto it and it promptly rose into the air until it reached the spot where that circle of flat glass-like panels circled in the air loooking like someone had made a glowing sun catcher with invisible string. Vash reached out to touch one of them and it immedicately steadied and floated toward him.

"Oh! I recognize this game," Milly said cheerfully.

The glass-like panel was a perfectly equilateral triangle with a triple-axis grid painted in glowing lines on the surface of it. The grid was empty and as soon as it settled in front of Vash a work station formed with two holo-screens glowing softly to either side of the main screen one with pre-made node-patterns in it and the other with a blank screen and an ephemeral keypad below it so he could work out the grid.

"Looks like it's going to be another long one," Vash muttered resighnedly. There were eight of these damned panels hovering around him and probably just as many other panels with triple axis grids on them just waiting for him. Great, he might be here all week.

"Good thing I brought snacks," Milly said cheerfully. Vash grinned.

"That's thinking ahead Milly!"

"You bet!" she agreed with him.

Vash made himself comfortable to get started to work on the grid and Milly settled on the other part of the floating platform and reached into the little ruck sack she'd brought with her. Vash smiled when he saw what she'd brought along.

"Doc loan you that?" he asked absently frm where he concentrated on his challenge.

"He sure did, he said I would probaly have a long time to wait down here so he thought I should have something to help occupy the time."

The doc had loaned her a small, thin, vid player and a collection of data sticks that probably contained hours worth of vids.

"Good thinking," Vash said and settled back into the slightly trancelike state that characterized him when he had serious work to do. The hours slipped by unnoticed.

* * *

**A bit of a filler chapter, enough to hint at Remembrance's back-ground but still leave you with more questions than answers... heh heh heh. Tell me what you all thought of it.**


	50. Safe

Knives surveryed the small prison camp where he had ordered his servant Legato to pen in all of the sacrifices that would eventually go into feeding his device. Humans from all corners of the Southern Cornelia Region had been gathered there, they were all young men and women in the prime of their life some younger but not many of the older ones had managed to make the arduous trek across the sands forced by the mental skill of his pet telepath. They'd already tried one rebellion and it had been put down easily by the hands of his secondary Gung Ho Guns, he'd kept them on short rations since then both as a punishment and to keep them too weak to resist later on. There had been some deaths of course, but he'd taken that into account and things were running pretty much according to plan.

The black Cairn was made of plant-glass, that was the sheer energy that had been released when his and his Brother's arms had resonated with one another had melted down the sand into liquid silicon and it had formed into glass. As such, the material, by its nature was extremely sensitive to the vibrations of psi-wave energy, the energy that plants emitted and that humans brains could make that enabled them to wield what they called psychic abilities; telepathy, telekinesis and so on. Since Vash had started activating the Great Nodes there had been a tremendous upwelling of power within the world. It was on a level that Knives had never before sensed, or even imagined.

:_Could it actually be that my sisters, for all this time, have been holding back the true depth of their power_?: Knives thought in wonder.

If that were true, then he and his siblings were capable of so much more than he had ever thought possible, and he had thought a great deal possible.

The Cairn resonated with the power and every time Vash activated one of the nodes that resonance grew exponentially greater. The resonance had at first been so slight that even Knives thought that he had been imagining things and his senses for such things were a hundred times better than a mere human's. Now that the fourth Node had been complete Vash felt that resonance change ever so slightly, it seemed to have changed into some kind of... pattern. But even Knives for all of his greater senses couldn't quite make it out.

"Report," he commanded into the screen where the figure of one of his Guns waited on the other end to be acknowledged.

"Your brother is at the fifth node," Strell the Carrion Crow informed him. "I've had to mind jump from bird to bird instead of relying on my pretties to follow him because the distance he has covered in a short time is so vast. He's using a shuttle from that SEEDs ship that Leonoff the Puppetmaster felled last year. There are two people besides the insurance woman with him right now, both from the downed ship; an old man and a young woman."

"Have you seen the keystone itself?" Knives demanded next.

That was the information he was urgently interested in.

"I have only caught glimpses of it Master Knives," the Carrion Crow replied. "He keeps it with him or on the ship at all times as far as I can tell, but it is the keystone, plus a strange pendant-like necklace that he wears, that leads him to the site of the next Great Node and unlocks the challenges when he gets there."

"Is that all you have to report?"

"Yes Master Knives, that is all I have so far," the Carrion Crow said nervously.

And well he should be nervous, if Knives so desired he could reach out with his senses and crush the tiny mind of his servant with barely and effort on his part.

"Adequate. Barely," Knives advised him, judging his performance thus far. "Continue to observe my brother. That is your only priority and do whatever you must to keep up with him, this is worth more than your life, understand that."

"Yes Master," Srell replied, swallowing.

"Out," he said, clicking off the device.

It had taken him a little over an hour to finish off the first grid for the triangular-shaped floating glassy panel and that time wasn't bad. Vash worked quickly but the grid itself was complex having a multitude of axes spiraling out from a central node, the nodes themselves were as complex as any he'd come across and there were numerous sub-grids folded in along the lines of each axis, some of those subgrids had more than one axis themselves and multiple nodes on them, it was more than a little tricky to figure out how to code an appropriate subgrid that would get done what he needed done and yet not interfere with the functions of the main grid. Vash suspected that if he hadn't been what he was (a plant) he wouldn't have been able to do it.

:_And that was only one panel_,: he thought more than a little morosely as another panel separated itself out from the little ring of floating panels and floated its little way over to him.

Part of him thought the work was interesting, these were actual functions of the Gaea Device itself after all, but a larger part of him thought that the work was tedious and there were other, more important things he could be doing right then. Like rescuing Meryl. Sure, technically by his compliance with his brother's demands he _was _rescuing her; once the keystone was finished he would have a bargaining chip to use to get her away from Knives, but there in an underground cavern, faced with hours upon hours of tedious, grinding work it didn't feel much like a rescue at all. He wanted to be up there, in the suns, chasing his brother down and recapturing Meryl by main force. It would be so much more heroic if he could go striding into his brother's stronghold and demand her return or else. It would be much more fitting if he could sweep her off her feet and carry her away to safety like something out of a story. That was more like what he would like to be doing, partly because he'd like to see her look at him like her rescuer.

:_Yeah, and that would also be a very romantic way to get her killed_,: Vash remineded himself.

He was under no illusions now that his brother would not kill one lone single human as a lesson in obedence if he thought that Vash wasn't playing the game by his rules. If Vash didn't play along, the next body part that Knives sent to him would probably be her head.

:_I can't risk that_,: Vash thought fiercely.

Even if it meant traipsing across the face of the world and spending days solving puzzles, he couldn't let her get hurt any more than she already was. Who knew what kind of treatment she was receiving under his care right then. Knives might keep her alive and relatively unharmed but Vash didn't think he would care much beyond that. He wouldn't see to things like her comfort or her health unless she was on the verge of death Vash would bet.

:_That's why I have to get this done_,: Vash thought a little frantically as another set of workstations unfolded itself from the new grid-panel, like a flower opening.

Vash locked his mind into work mode and set to work. There were six panels left for this set not even counting the one he was just getting started on, and after that there were twelve more sets of them. He'd probably have to send Milly to the surface for reinforcements sooner or later. He didn't intend to stop for anything more than food and only the amount of rest absolutely neccessary to keep himself from collapsing. He was going to finish this and then when he was done with that he was going to move onto the next until the keystone was done, and once it was done he was going to go and get his short girl back.

:_But once she's back_...: he thought in a second-guessing manner.

He had originally been resolved that he was going to send her straight home where she would (hopefully) be safe. Now that the Angels had shared with him the fact that she and her entire family had been involved with the Gaea Project for generations and that Meryl was personally a part of the Device itself, that changed things. Knives might not know about that particular facet of matters, but then again Vash couldn't be absolutely certain of that. If he wasn't aware of it he might decide to go after her (as he had on so many other occasions) as a way to strike back indirectly at Vash. If he did that and discovered Meryl's _true _value, then the whole world was doomed. She was the last safeguard on the Gaea Device, the final peice that his sisters had made to keep the Device from falling into the wrong hands.

:_My sisters entrusted her to me to protect_,: Vash thought.

Well, there had been more to it than that, his sisters had sent her to him not only to look out for but also, apparently because they wanted to see that the two of them were mated in the human fashion. Apparently, they had nothing better to do inside their bulbs than to create massive devices for terra-formation and play matchmaker with their free-born little brothers.

:_The illusion of safety is one that neither of us can afford now_,: he reminded himself. :_Whether she likes it or not, whether I like it or not, it appears that we're both in this_.:

She was a piece of the Gaea Device and as such she was going to be a prize that Knives would go to great lengths to acquire. Aside of the fact that he'd do it anyway because she was his Short Girl, Vash had to keep his brother's mitts off her.

:_At least he doesn't seem to know what he has_,: Vash thought with relief.

It was more than a little ironic, Knives had a part of the very thing he went to such great lengths to get hold of right under his very nose and he didn't even know it.

:_Heaven save her if he ever finds out about it_,: Vash thought with a fervent prayer for her safety.

He wasn't absolutetly certain of a higher being but he figured that it couldn't hurt. He figured that if said higher being existed he was probably getting awfully tired of being innundated by the sound of her name from his lips asking for her safety.

:_Knives can have the stupid rock_,: Vash thought, turning his thought away from thier inner soliloquy to concentrate more fully on the task in front of him.

_:As long as she's safe from him he can have the keystone. I just want Meryl back safe with me_.:

* * *

**Fifty Chapters! That's quite a mile stone. I hope I've managed to you you all interested so far, and continue to do so in the future, drop me a line if you liked it.**


	51. Afterburn

She'd left the entry-way to the stone shelter open to the night air that night instead of sealing it closed because she didn't think she could have handled being closed in right then. Her two (now three) companions all seemed to be sleeping the sleep of the mentally and physically exhausted. She had laid down at the same time the rest of them had, with the plan of getting some sleep, with all of the grid-casting and fighting and... the _other _thing she'd done that day, she was feeling drained herself, but even though she'd closed her eyes and her body was crying for rest, sleep would not come to her.

Though she was wrapped warmly in a blanket she'd liberated from the enemy camp her body shook in visceral memory.

It felt different from the way that using her Channels to take power from a Source-stone felt. _That _sensation usually felt like a mildly sharp sting, like a cat-scratch with salt water poured on it. What she had done to free her friend from Legato's psychic clutches had been another order of matters altogether. It had burned through her like fire but it had felt so _cold_. She hadn't thought that cold could burn so painfully.

Legato had fought her. Even as she had wrapped her Channels around him like tiny grappling vines, tangling in and taking hold of his meridians to draw him out of the body he wrongfully inhabited, Legato had struggled against her, clawing and lashing and thrashing desperately with his own powers. She'd fought him, drawing his remaining life-energy into her Channels like pulling water into a straw. It had felt like she was tearing him out, bits of him, piece by piece.

She'd pulled on him, on his vital essence, and something within her had been sickened by what she was doing. That was his Source, his vital essence, the _core _of him, that eternal energy that was more than the sum of the "meat" that a person was, and she was treating it like it was nothing of greater import than a Source-stone. Her spirit had rebelled against what she'd been doing, but at the same time she knew she couldn't leave Legato alone to do what he wanted with a body that was not rightfully his, so she'd continued to disentangle him from his grip on Wolfwood's Sources and his meridians. Bit by bit she'd won the battle but it came with a bitter cost.

She discovered, to her pain, that connecting her Channels so intimately to another persons Source and meridians forged an intimate connection with that person. She'd _Seen _him, she'd seen what made him what he was. Legato was a crazed as a mad dog, but there was no other way for him to be, the terrible things he's seen in his life and the even more terrible things he'd been made to do as a small boy... it was sickening. That anyone, especially an adult that should know better could do such sickening things to a child that could not defend himself, worse yet that the person had known of Legato's abilities and enjoyed the fact that he could feel the pervesion taking hold was _beyond _sick. No wonder he'd thought humanity was a low, vile thing that deserved eradication! Meryl supposed if she'd survived the things that that poor boy had to, and then been "rescued" and trained by a person who's only thought was to end the suffering of a people who had no choice but to support the rapaciousness of an ungrateful people in order to survive... maybe she'd have felt the same way.

Regardless of what had made him what he was, what she'd done to rip him out of Wolfwood's body him had felt _awful_. It had been a slow, cold fire spreading out along her meridians, even as she had taken him in through her Channels, he had raced along like a flame on an oil spill, trying to take control of _her_. Desperately she'd twisted her Channels this way and that, weaving them into patterns, blocking and sheilding him by whatever peice of his life-energy she could get a hold of, then releasing him, bit by bit into grids she wove. Every time she'd done it, she'd felt a flare of ice, so cold that it was excruciating, slam through her. He was dying, bit by bit, inside of her and she was _killing _him. It had been horrible. Absolutely terrible.

Meryl slipped out from her bedroll and out of the cave to be by herself. Right at that moment, she didn't think she could take being around other people whether they were awake or not. The constant grate of their energy along her own sensitive nerves and Channels still raw from the act she'd been forced to commit was maddening. The took a deep breath of the chill night air, already the temperature had dropped like a stone and it was almost cold enough to see her breath. Meryl tried not to let the sensation of sucking cold air into her lungs remind her of how it had felt to pull him into her Channels.

She'd killed him, perhaps in one of the worst ways possible because not only was his body no more but that vital energy, his Source, had been spent. It was gone, dispersed, and she did not know what happened to it. And she knew deep down without knowing exactly how she knew, that while she had killed him, he had killed a little bit of her. The cold fire that had spread out through her Channels had had left her feeling empty and achingly cold, like she would never be quite warm again.

She'd stuffed it aside in the interests of getting on with the day, but now that she had stopped moving, the horror of it had caught up to her.

Meryl hung her head, alone in the night, her shoulders bowed in an attitude of defeat. The stars burned cold and distant far away from her, and tears welled up, unbidden, in her eyes.

She'd never killed anyone before, let alone felt them inside of her, next to her heart, when they went, so she imagined that she must be feeling even worse than someone who merely had to pull a trigger or insert a knife in the correct spot (or any of the other various ways that one might visit premature and violent death on another). She had pulled out his very life's essence, struggling like a desperate beast and then she had killed it like a treacherous snake, hacking it apart bit by bit until it was no more. All of this and she had seen the person he was, she had felt the last little trickle of him slip away.

:am i a monster,: she wondered.

Was this what this power of hers was really about? She had been given a gift that was meant to create and to heal, and she had used it to destroy, worse, she had used it to take a life! She'd never asked for her powers, but she had always, in the back of her mind, figured that if she were ever really going to use them for something important, she'd use them to help people and to make the world a little better. The situation had not been a good one but Meryl couldn't help feeling that if she would have just looked a little bit harder, maybe she would have been able to think of a way to save them both.

:Impossible,: her logical mind supplied for her.

Legato had already been dead. The body-stealing meridian of what was left of his consciousness was unnatural in the world. If she had left it alone he would have continued to use it to do terrible things, things that he would have not had the right to do while he was alive, and doubly did not have the right to do while he was dead. No-one else could have pulled him out of his host and disposed of the last of him.

:If you were going to try to save what was left of him somehow,: she thought at herself. :Provided you had been able to draw all of him out of there without him taking control of you instead of his original host, what would you have done with him? Where else could you put him?:

She didn't have an answer to that question. The only thing she could think of was simply not feasible... put him in another body. Ew. No. Bu that did not change the lingering horror in her heart that she felt when she thought about how it had felt to disperse the last of his energy. That cold, terrible emptiness.

And yet... despite this horror, despite the icy grief that welled up inside of her at what she had done until her chest felt like an icy cavity, there was a core inside of her that was curiously unmoved by it all. There was a part of her made of steel and lightning that looked at the terrible thing she did with clear a clear unwavering gaze, acknowledged it and then said, 'yes it was terrible, yes I feel terrible, but it was necessary... in the end I couldn't have just left matters they way you were.' She did grieve, but there was a greater part of her that accepted her action as being the hard, but terribly correct path.

Yes she had wiped out the existence of a person, and yes the icy-fire that burned all along her had made her feel terrible... but the worst thing in her mind was that she had thought she would feel worse about it than she did. And that was why she cried.

:I must be the worst person in existence,: she berated herself. :If I were a better person, I'd feel worse about this than I do. There must be something wrong with me... do i have no principles? Am I just as cold-hearted as everyone in the office whispers about me behind my back? I must be, because even though what I did bothers me, it doesn't seem to be destroying me from the inside.:

When Vash had had to kill a person (the same one she had as a matter of fact) it had very nearly destroyed him from the inside. His cries of agony still echoed in her memory, and his pain, like the Lingering that had killed her father, had very nearly sucked his soul dry. Meryl was sad, but she wasn't torn. There was a cold, nearly indifferent part of her that said that Legato had made his decisions and she had made hers. She would live with them and he would not be around to harm anyone she held dear again.

But even so the horrible feel of his energy lingered in her senses like the horrible afterburn of swallowing a strong brandy. But it was cold and it wasn't fading, her body wouldn't stop shaking...

A great heaving sob clawed its way up from deep within her even as she tried to hold it down it was followed by another. Her body shook with the effort of trying to hold them in and she was unsuccessful. Like the contractions of labor, her body would give birth to its grief, with or without her willing consent. She curled around her misery in the night and helplessly let it do with her what it must.

She did not grieve for the fact that the person was dead, and she didn't grieve for the fact that she was the one who did it. Meryl's heart twisted with the inner knowledge that if she had the same situation to deal with all over again she'd do exactly the same. And that was what made her chest heave with grief and her throat ache with her sobs. Sure she felt bad, but if she were a better person she'd feel _worse _about it. What kind of a woman- what kind of a _human being_ was she?

She heard the scuff of a heavy, and familiar footstep in the gravelly sands behind her. She tried to hurriedly scrub at her face and even out her breaths to cover up the fact that she'd been crying. She should have gone farther away if she was going to grieve, but Meryl had been wary about abandoning her friends for very long so shortly after events.

"Hey. Cold night," the deep mellow tone of the priest remarked to her.

He still sounded weak, last she knew he hadn't been able to even hold himself up... it looked like his own meridians were flowing back into their proper places faster than she had suspected they would. He was leaning against the wall to hold himself up, but his eyes were as sharp as ever and that hazy, half-stuporish look had left his face. It looked like he was back to his old, annoying self. How very inconvenient.

"Yeah," Meryl said, neutrally, hoping her voice didn't betray the fact that she'd been crying.

She wanted to maintain at least the pretense of dignity, even though it seemed that her usual iron-clad facade of capability and competence had fled her. Meryl had always prided herself on her ability to hold it together in any and all situations, she hadn't panicked as a child in the events of Stryfe, nor in the aftermath, not at Augusta nor at the Legato Incident. She didn't like people seeing her weak.

Wordlessly the strong large hand of the priest extended to her a clean square of plain white cloth, letting her know without saying anything that he _knew_.

"I'm good," she maintained, trying to gathered up her scattered shreds of composure and re-knit her cloak of pride.

She was betrayed by a sniffle.

"You, ah... y'wanna talk about it?" he asked.

His tone was more circumspect than she had ever heard come from him, normally he was loud and somewhat obnoxious.

"I'm f-" she started.

"You're not fine," he said flatly. "Otherwise you'd be in there with the other two sleeping the sleep of the just."

"So then why are you out here?" Meryl demeanded.

In her book, offense was always the best defense. It was one of her life's mottoes.

"Same reason y'know?" he said, slumping down to the ground and leaning his back against the rock right next to her and staring up and out at the chill, impersonal light from the stars brightened whitely by the light from the second moon.

"You don't share space with... well, I mean, we were both trying to live in this same shell, against the laws of man, god and nature I'd like to add, and you don't have that guy's soul in the same place where yours is supposed to be and not... be affected by it."

Meryl looked beyond her own sense of self-pity at what she'd just endured and noticed that the priest, nominally one of her friends, though they didn't actually interact much, was going through something too and it might be worse than what she'd been going through. After all, he'd been supposed to have been dead and suddenly his body is playing host to a cold-blooded, murdering sociopath and he couldn't do a damned thing about it. And it had been that way for _weeks_.

"It must have been awful," she said quietly.

Not trying to pity him, but letting him know that she could sort of understand where he was coming from. He made a small grunt of acknowledgment, typical man, always putting on a manly strong front... He was patting himself, searching for something.

"What?" she asked curious (despite the fact that she was still wiping away tears and sniffles) as to what he was looking for.

"Figures that sadistic bastard wouldn't leave me a single cig," he muttered.

Meryl laughed weakly, as she was sure he'd meant her to. They didn't say anything for a minute or two, but when the silence was broken, it was Mister Wolfwood who spoke.

"When he, uh, took up housekeeping, I tried everything I could think of to push him out, but he was just too good and I didn't have the stuff to hold him off. The only thing I could do was keep to the shadows of my own mind and poke around here and there to see if there wasn't a way I could get him out. I couldn't find a way to fight him off but I found out everything he knew about what Knives is up to. And one other thing..."

"What's that?" Meryl asked.

"He was one sick puppy," Wolfwood said with finality.

"But I saw-" protested, oddly moved to defend him, at least a little, after what she'd seen of his past.

"You saw what he wanted you to see," Wolfwood replied. "You gotta remember that he's a master manipulator. He knows that one of the ways to win out over an enemy is to make them feel sorry for ya. If you had hesitated, even for a moment, and he'd gotten even a toehold in you, things coulda been _bad_. Really, _really _bad. So, for what it's worth... I don't think you were wrong so you shouldn't, you know, beat yourself up over it."

Meryl turned, tears still creeping out of their own volition from her eyes and looked at him.

"It was awful," she whispered. "Feeling him there, like a snake made of ice, trying to weave himself inside me and take control. I think the only thing that saved me was all that practice I got with grounding, shielding and centering. I could isolate bits of him and disperse the energy before he could wrap himself around my Source. But even so, it felt terrible. Cold, and dead, and... it burned but it was still so _cold_. I can feel the cold in me still. But that's not the worst thing about this mess."

"What is?" Wolfwood asked quietly.

The serious side of the priest was something she rarely saw but she was glad of it on this occasion.

"Well... my father always told me that it was wrong to take a life, no matter what the provocation was. He always told me that that was a right reserved for God and not man. But then he- well never mind. But I've always tried to honor his memory by living up to the values he instilled in me."

"So you feel like you've failed him, or at least failed his memory," Wolfwood pressed gently.

"That's part of it... but to be honest that's not really what bothers me so much."

"So what is it?" he asked curiously.

So she told him.

When she was done he looked blankly back at her and after a long pause said

"Lemme get this straight. You're not freaking out over the fact that you essentially killed a person, but the only thing that bothers you is that you don't feel _worse _about it inside than you do?"

"Put that way, it does sound a little odd, but... yeah. It bothers me. I think there must be something wrong with me."

Wolfwood still regarded her with a blank expression and she scowled over at him

"You're a priest, you're supposed to have something yo say about this!"

"I think you're knocking on the wrong chapel door sister," he grinned wryly. "I mean, there's that old saying about he without sin having the right to cast stones. Lord knows I'm no bastion of purity and goodness over here."

Then he got a wan lopsided smile on his face as he quasi-cheerfully added

"Besides... technically he was already dead. So what you did was more like an exorcism."

"Don't slice trivialities with me," she grumbled.

Wolfwood sighed and leaned his head back, obviously trying to think of something to say. Finally he said

"I don't exactly have the purest of pasts you know. The number of people you've killed stacked against the number I have is... well, hardly worth mentioning put it that way, so I think you can understand why I don't exactly feel qualified to preach about how much guilt you should or should not feel."

"I should at least feel something!" she said with soft intensity. "But every time I poke at it and turn it over to see what's on the other side, I keep waiting for this great up welling of guilt and shame to pop up and it just doesn't. All I get is the feeling that you're right, the guy was _sick_. I mean, there was nothing anyone could do to save him; he wasn't just twisted, he was warped beyond all repair. There's this cold knowledge deep down in me that says you don't show mercy to a rabid dog, you kill it before it destroys something you love. I feel sad that he's dead, and I feel sad that I had to do it, but there was no-one else to do it and the consequences of my doing nothing don't bear thinking of. Even with that knowledge, I still think I should feel more than just sad about it."

"That's a toughie," he agreed with her. "But you're too practical for self-flagellation Short Girl."

"I guess you're right," she replied softly, resting her chin on her knees and staring out into space in silence.

"So... I guess you know about Knives now, I mean if you didn't before you have to by now."

"Vash told me, at least he told me the basics. Hard to believe sometimes, still. How did you find out?"

"My uh, my teacher was also my uncle-"

"Are you _really _a priest?" Meryl demanded skeptically, looking over at him.

"Of course!" Wolfwood replied, a little offended. "We just took a little different interpretation of the Word, that's all. Or at least my uncle did. I was trained by him. At the time he hired on with the Guns we were sort of a package deal. Ya buy one, ya get the other. My uncle mostly had me doing make-work at the time, guard a caravan, save a woman's life and so on. I got to save lives, so I guess I was okay with it. Then he hired on with Legato, this assignment was supposed to be the one where I became an equal instead of a junior partner and I got assigned one thing, tail Vash the Stampede and keep him alive."

"You were working for Knives?" Meryl said, genuinely surprised. "I don't believe this!"

Wolfwood cleared his throat and avoided her glare.

"I can't defend it," he said after a long heated silence. "The only thing I can say is that I came to realize I was on the wrong side. He's my _friend _y'know? I uh, I wasn't expecting ta ever have a real friend."

Meryl made a small considering noise in her throat, like she wasn't sure whether she was going to believe him or not.

"I even went against my teacher in the end," Wolfwood continued. "Fat lot of good it did me. I'm not sure that wasn't all part of _his _master plan now. You know, get me in close and even if I change my mind I'm still someone he trusts and Legato can sneak in through the backdoor. It sounds like something he'd think of."

"Yeah, I guess," Meryl said unhappily.

"You're, ah, sure he's gone... right?" Wolfwood said, understandably anxious.

"Oh yes, he's _definitely _gone," Meryl said with a heavy certainty.

Wolfwood let out a long sigh of relief. They sat for a few more minute with nothing to say, just enjoying a peaceful breather. Finally, it was Meryl who broke the silence.

"It's good you decided to be a loyal friend Mister Wolfwood," Meryl said in more normal tones. "Betrayal doesn't suit you. But there is one little matter I'd like to bring out into the open and discuss with you, just so you know how I feel."

Wolfwood must have sensed something in her secure, business-like tones that put him on edge for he looked warily over at her.

"And what's that?" he asked cautiously.

She turned and looked at him squarely, holding his gaze with her own in that strict, direct manner she had when she took on her full authority as Meryl Stryfe of the Bernardelli Insurance Society, Senior Partner and Class A-1 Disaster Investigator.

"You made Milly _cry_, Mister Wolfwood."

She did not sound pleased and the priest rightly winced.

"I never meant to hurt her but-" he started.

"I accept no excuses," she cut him off firmly. "Milly is my junior partner as well as my friend, and it is a credit to her that she has managed so well through a time a great grief that you, sir, are the source of. However, I do not believe that I am wrong in chastising you for your careless disregard for your own life and her feelings. It is not company policy for employees to meddle in one another's affairs save where it interferes with their working relationship; on such grounds I feel free to give you fair warning..."

Meryl paused and looked over at a nearby rock, Sighting it and spinning out a grid. A heartbeat later she gestured and it exploded. Woldwoods eyes widened.

"As the senior partner I feel it is my place to look out for her better interests; if I do not feel that you are her better interests, I will remove _you_. I trust I have made myself clear."

Wolfwood was still staring at the blackened spot where the little pebble had just been with wide unbelieving eyes. The rock had actually disintegrated into blackened slag in one spot.

"Cr-crystal," he managed.

* * *

_I love this chapter. ^_^_


	52. Daydream Believer

It had taken him more than a few hours to complete the grid for each separate shard, but he discovered that when he completed a panel it floated over and connected itself to the edge of its already completed siblings, slowly making a shape, panel by panel. It didn't take longer than three panels for Vash to begin to recognize the shape. A pyramid shape formed, side by side, and since there were eight panels in all, it was a reasonably safe bet to make that the final shape would mimic that of the keystone, an octahedron.

He was on the eighth panel at last, and nearly finished, a mostly whole octahedron shape floated aimlessly in the air nearby, the grids glowing with a dull grey-ish light in a complex spiderweb of spiraling knotwork patterns dotted with regular nodes of intricate lacework designs. It was pretty, but he was more than ready to be done with it.

Vash tapped out the parameters on the sub grid at the last node on the tertiary grid to to the main function and followed it back to the secondary grid, absently checking for errors as he did so, but really he wasn't the sort who made errors on paper like this, his only errors were in real life.

:_In real life, where I always wonder if I should have just told her how I feel and damn the consequences_,: Vash thought to himself.

Altogether it had been nearly four years that they had known each other. Sure, Vash had people who had known him longer; the Doc for instance had known him for close to sixty years, but all of the people who had known him for a long time (save his brother) were on the now fallen SEEDs ship in New Oregon. The people on the SEEDs ship weren't _bad _people, but up until the point where they had been more or less forced to join the rest of humanity on the surface world, they had all had a bit of a phobia and paranoia with regards to their unfortunate fellow humans. They lived in a world apart, a separate world devoted to keeping the order and civilization of a by-gone day alive. It was an order of people forever looking backwards, as if by clinging so desperately to the past they could ward off misfortune. Vash had very little to do with them to be honest, and could not sympathize one little tiny bit with their attitude. In fact, he privately thought it stank. He'd been there in the hard years after the Great Fall, witnessed humanity sink to a level of almost bestial fear and occasional depravity, then pull itself up by its bootstraps and force itself into something better, force itself back onto the road to peace and hope and order. All the generations of the SEEDs shippers just looked down on them from their height with a very distant sort of pity and the hope that they'd never have to end up that way. Vash couldn't sympathize with any of the ones who lived each day in isolation and fear of change at all.

_:But Meryl_...: he thought.

Meryl was a surface worlder, like him. She was tough, and ornery, and occasionally violent... and yet capable of such kindness and compassion (even though she tried hard to hide it). Jessica was nice enough, and very sweet, but he just couldn't _connect _with her the same way. Meryl was from his world, she could understand the struggle it was just to survive from day to day, even the people who had known him the longest didn't really know where he was coming from most of the time. It was because she _knew _what suffering the world was capable of bringing about that Vash felt he had a greater bond with Meryl than he and Jessica were capable of. Meryl knew things about life and the world that Jessica couldn't begin to comprehend. In many ways (despite the similarities in age) Meryl was a woman where Jessica was still very much a child.

She had followed him and helped him and even protected him during some of the hardest times of his life. Granted that the Great Fall had been no picnic and traveling with Knives through their adolescence and young adulthood hadn't been a barrel of laughs either, nor had July and the ensuing years in which had been hunted by bounty hunters and the law. In Vash's mind however, none of all of those many long years in his life could hold a candle to what had happened in recent years; Legato, and the Gung-Ho Guns coming at him one by one, testing him, torturing him in different ways, making him suffer. No matter how hard he'd tried to ditch her or shake her from his trail, there Meryl had been... just a pace behind him. He hadn't realized it then but her being there had given him something real and present to focus his energy on. He had always protected people in the abstract, the face of every person he'd saved, man or woman, had been painted over by the visage of the one person he hadn't saved. Rem. But Meryl had swiftly become very much a person in her own right (if only because her sheer force of personality would not allow anything less) she'd very forcefully hollowed out her own little niche in his life (and in his heart). Now, instead of protecting people in general, he protected _her_.

:_And a fine job I've managed of that one too_,: he thought dejectedly.

Maybe it had only been a matter of time before his life caught up with her. Really, the fact that she had survived being around him for so long unscathed was beating the odds. If he'd cared for her at all, he'd have sent her packing right after she'd caught up with him on the sandsteamer but... he hadn't, and he hadn't _wanted _to. He'd _liked _having her near.

:_I even kept that handkerchief she loaned me_,: Vash thought with some wry amusement as his hand reached of its own accord into his coat pocket to touch the little square of white cotton like a talisman.

He'd meant to wash it and return it to her but he kept making excuses not to and she never demanded it back, so since she had seemed to forget about it, he'd just kept it. He wasn't in the habit of keeping much in the way of possessions and momentos, a hard life always on the run had made him a light traveler by necessity, but this was one possession Vash didn't intend to leave behind as useless.

He'd toyed with the idea, in his absent fantasies, of telling Meryl how much she had come to mean to him, but had always given the idea up as ludicrous. He was pretty sure she didn't see him that way, even if she was relatively nice to him. Even if she did, he was still Vash the Stampede, man with a sixty billion double dollar bounty on his head, how could he possibly hope to have anything that approached a normal life with her? He couldn't! There were assassins and Gung-Ho Guns and bounty hunters (not to mention the law) all out for his blood and that was not even factoring in his vengeful brothers input into the matter (which was not favorable). No matter what way you looked at it, it just wouldn't work. But if he were to be honest with himself, he'd admit that he'd often wished that it would.

Sometimes, during the interim year between what had happened at Augusta and when Wolfwood had found him again, he'd day-dreamed about what it would be like if he could just go to her as just an ordinary man who liked a pretty girl. He'd imagined tracking her down in her city (he knew she lived in the 2nd city of December and she worked at the Bernardelli's branch office there). He'd fantasized about casually showing up one day, with various different scenes of touching reunion (and in none of which did she hit him) and asking her out. In his mind he thought he might perhaps ask her to dinner, or, since December was famous for its theater district, he could ask her to a play. He'd imagined them doing all of the normal couple-type things that he saw everyone else getting to do (and he never got to) like strolling arm in arm down the street to take in the evening air, or attending an outdoor night-time festival. He'd imagined taking her out for drinks and dancing, playing cards at a local casino... kissing on the front porch. He knew it had never been more than an idle fantasy (for one thing, he was pretty sure Knives probably had some of his employees watching his old friends to see if he popped up) but the fancy had been an attractive one to him and one he'd indulged in often during his idle hours. Even on the SEEDs ship he'd never gotten a normal life, but even if it could only have been for a little while, he wouldn't have minded "playing house" with her. He'd even let the fantasy play out one lazy afternoon to the point where she had accepted his marriage proposal and had been neatly installed in some small apartments with him on the (then) floating Sky City. He had known that it wouldn't happen, but he hadn't seen the harm in letting himself dream a little bit.

When he'd gotten back with Knives slung over his shoulder he had been so hopeful that maybe his dreams wouldn't be just a fantasy anymore, maybe he could tell the lady who'd come to mean so much to him how he felt about her and there wouldn't be any Sword of Damocles hanging over his head to prevent him. Maybe he could stop being Vash the Stampede and just be Vash.

:_Of course, then Knives just had to go and pull this crap_,: he thought in irritation, tapping the last of the grid parameters into place and releasing the last panel to join the figure they made hanging in the air. It looked like someone had taken two glass pyramids and glued them together end to end and just left them floating in midair.

The octahedron descended, along with their little lift, back down to the ground and floated over to the little waist high pillar in front of the lift and inserted itself into the triangular indented slot in the top surface of the pillar. a moment later there was a great flare of light. The spiderweb-like patterns of the grids decorating the outside of the transparent octahedrons pulsed and a brilliant nimbus of pure white light osmosed into the center of the newly made multi-facted grid like someone had trapped a genie inside a strangely shaped bottle. Thick ropey strands of the glowing star-stuff spiralled out into the Source nodes of each grid from the central cloud of it and light raced along the channels of the freshly made grid like someone had set a match to an oil puddle. Once completed they pulsed once, as if making a point, then just glowed there. the pillar beneath it glowed softly as well.

Vash and Milly exchanged a long glance. Finally Vash said, with resignation

"One down, five more to go."

"You can do it Mister Vash!" Milly cheered.

A cheer which was flattened a little bit by the fact that it was followed by a yawn and the sound of her stomach rumbling.

"How about we take a short break for some food first?" he said. "I don't know about you, but I never think well on an empty stomach."

She quickly agreed and they unpacked the picnic basket that Jessica had packed for them. He felt a little bad about ordering her to stay on the ship when she had gone to such troubles to take care of him (she'd even packed his favorite foods) but only a _little _bad. He still didn't think having her along was such a good idea, to his mind that meant one more hostage for Knives to shoot at, or remove fingers from.

:_Clearly, she's from the "the shortest route to a man's heart is through his stomach" school of courtship_,: Vash thought with a wry bit of humor when the unpacking was through.

She'd packed enough to feed a small army. Granted, some of that could be because she'd thought she was going too at the time, but really, there was enough food there to feed five comfortably. It was all from the ships synth-machines, ancient technology that recombined organic substances into recognizable foods, but he could tell that she'd taken the time to rearrange the foods into an attractive display as a sign of her domesticity.

Regardless of whether or not the person who made the food for him might or might not be trying to lure him into domestication, the food was good and filling. Between the two of them they polished off most of it, the rest they set aside for later and Vash boarded the next lift to start on the next panel. Soonest started was soonest done, and he wanted this done with so he could go rescue Meryl from his brother.


	53. Reasonable Doubt

:_Sheesh, I'm dead for a month and the whole battelfeild changes_,: Wolfwood thought to himself as Meryl finished summing up what had happened since he'd gone MIA.

That wasn't counting what he knew, through listening to Legato and being smeared with that freak's memories while the telepath's mind had been occupying his body, about the secondary GHG squad, their mission and the bit about the other Channel (unfortunately, it was apparent that the guy the Knives had kidnapped and was currently trying to torture into submission and Meryl's brother were the same person) and Knives' mission that he'd sent Vash on after ordering Meryl taken as collateral. He still had yet to bring the poor girl up to speed on what had happened.

:_But **this **was an unexpected development_!: he thought to himself in amazement as Meryl related to him her sudden regression into an ability that had been supressed in her late childhood.

It was a bit strange though, most people didn't forget a whole lot by the time they reached ten... usually those memories were ingrained and clear enough to be recalled with ease years later (his own, without a doubt had been). It seemed suspicious that she would just "forget" about an ability she'd grown up using.

:_Gonna have to side with Meryl's suspicion on this one then; someone, or something, **helped **her to forget_,: Wolfwood decided.

"... and maybe it was my smallest, least useful finger on my left hand, but it was _mine_," she grumbled, showing him the tiny abreviated digit wrapped in a torn scrap of white cloth on her left hand.

Wolfwood's eyes widened at that. Legato hadn't been the one who relayed the order or carried it out, so he hadn't known that that bastard had ordered her finger to be removed, he felt his temper flare in sympathetic anger. That was just wrong.

:_Vash must be **pissed**_,: Wolfwood thought absently.

The only reason Knives would order it would be to goad his brother.

Meryl continued on with her story telling about how she'd escaped with the Plant Angel that was "bonded" to her brother and that other woman named Remembrance who, so far as Meryl could tell had either grown up under a rock or from some strange religious commune or something.

"She might be from that Sky City place," Wolfwood conjectured aloud. "You know, the ship that was still up in orbit for the last hundred years or so and Leonoff the Puppetmaster and Hopperd the Gauntlet brought it down. I was up there with Vash while it was still floating. Those people... _sheesh_, it was _ridiculous_! Just because I was an outsider an' carried a gun, they treated me like I had some kind of infectious disease or something. The entire time I was there I wanted to line them all up, down to the last kid, and knock thier heads together! Anyway, the people there are sheltered, familiar with Lost Technology, _and _haven't had any contact with the real world."

"Good point, that would also explain how the heck she knew so much about the original project SEEDs and what a Resonant is and does. I mean, she knew more about my ancestry than _I_ did, for crying out loud, and my dad did research on it! I mean, I could understand Marcus not knowing anything, with my uncle bringing him up in ignorance of his heritage and all, but my father actively tried to understand and develop that side of himself and it seems he only scratched the surface."

"How come no-one knew about your family?" he asked next. "I mean, it must have come up... blood tests, DNA screens, even if none of your forebears ever checked into a medlab or a hospital, a lot of the public schools in the larger cities take samples and keep the info on file. It would have _had _to show up."

"As far as I know my father and grandfather were home-schooled and had tutors. My brother and I went to a private school, to which I understand that my uncle donated large amounts of money."

"I see, money keeps some secrets and lets others go," he said grunting to himself at it.

"Sometimes that's just the way the world works," she agreed. "But in this case I think my uncle did us all a favor in keeping our.._.aberration_ a secret. Could you imagine what my life would have been like if you-know-who found out about me and knew where to find me?"

"Good point," he agreed, shivering a little at the thought.

It seemed that the only thing that had kept Meryl and her brother safe was the very fact that no-one knew about them. As long as they didn't start trying to fulfil whatever purpose it was that their ancestors had been changed for, they had been able to fly below the radar.

Wolfwood began to match up some of the timelines in his head. Knives had given orders to Legato during the interim year that Vash had been recovering from the incident at Augusta for him to search for and acquire one of what Meryl was...

"What did she call you again?" he asked curiously.

"A Resonant," Meryl replied. "So anyway, that's not important right now, the important thing is that that guy has my brother. I'm going after him."

Whatever Wolfwood had been about to say was brought to a screeching halt as soon as those words left her mouth. There was only one thing he could say to _that _proposal, and that was

"The hell you are!"

She looked over at him.

"Excuse me?" she said, her eyebrows raising, her face took on it accustomed mulish and determined look.

"There is no way that I'm going to let you-"

"Did you just say _let_?" she demanded next.

"Go off on a foolish rescue run you haven't a prayer in hell of succeeding in, unarmed, unprepared and unprotected against a guy that can take out Vash the Stampede two battles out of three!" he said, choosing to ignore her interruption. "It's not just crazy, its damn near _suicidal_. You'd be killed, or even worse, _captured_."

"He caught me once and I seem to have escaped just fine," she pointed out.

"Correction," Wolfwood argued hotly but with logic. "One of his lesser henchmen caught you, and you escaped."

"I rescued you, didn't I?" she needled.

"You ambushed him," Wolfwood countered. "If Le- if that creep had been at his usual strength, he'd have _owned _you."

Meryl opened her mouth to object but wolfwood overrode her

"And Le-ga-" he took a breath and forced himself to say the name and release its hold over him. "And Legato has a _fraction _of the power that Knives can call. Taking him on would be like you arguing with a sandstorm, you can yell all you want but the only thing you're gonna get is a mouthful of sand."

"I can't just leave him there," she replied. "He's my brother. Who knows what kinds of things are happening to him."

Wolfwood knew what kinds of things were happening to her brother, the Channel, but he sure as hell wasn't going to tell her; if she was this determined _now _and she heard that her brother was being tortured, there was no way he'd be able to talk her out of throwing her life away stupidly. Of course she was worried about her family; Meryl's protective streak, once activated, was wide enough to cover the planet. Milly was it's usual recipient, but he'd bet that once blood got involved she wasn't going to listen to anyone or anything that might prevent her from leaping headfirst down a sandworm hole.

:_Keh_!: Wolfwood thought in amusement and exasperation. :_They seem so different in some ways and so much the same in others_.:

"C'mon, Short Girl, use that common sense of yours, you're supposed to be the calm collected one of the group. Use your head."

That seemed to cool her off for a moment. She stared off out into the darkened skies for a long time and Wolfwood slowly relaxed, figuring that maybe some of what he had said had actually managed to get through to her. He was about to congratulate himself on a job well done for once when she broke the silence.

"You're right," she said quietly. "I definitely should use my head in this situation."

"See?" he encouraged with that jovial smile on his face. "I knew you were the smart one Short Girl."

"Because I'm not going to run away or hide," she continued, not skipping a beat. "So the best thing to do would be to use my head and come up with a plan."

"Wha- That's not what I meant and you know it!" he said, exasperated.

"Be that as it may," Meryl replied looking him steadily in the eyes, her gaze unwavering. "I'm not going to leave my brother behind. I'll fight who I have to where I have to; I'll take on bandits, I'll take on Guns, I'll even take on Knives if it comes to that. I don't care if its crazy or even suicidal, I won't leave him. I'm not afraid to stand my ground and be strong, and I'm not about to let him push me around. You can do what you like, but I've made up my mind... now either lead, follow, or stay the hell out of my way."

The former assassin and Gung Ho Gun studied her for a long moment and seriously debated knocking her hard enough over the head to render her unconscious long enough for him to tie her up and stick her in a hole somewhere safe. He knew that that was the only way he was going to get her to _not _go through with her crazy plan. He reconsidered an instant later when he thought about what his dear Milly's reaction to that would be, and then inwardly cringed at exactly what Meryl would be like once she woke up.

:_See, this is what happens when a woman like Meryl decides to follow her heart_,: Wolfwood thought to himself. :_They just turn out to be ten times scarier and more formidable than anyone else in the entire galaxy.:_

He sighed, giving in, but he wasn't going to go along with something that would most likely get him killed (or worse) again without making at least _some _attempt at making the situation a success.

"Alright, I'll help you," he said. "After all, I do owe Spikey pretty big-time for a few things, the least I can do is make sure you don't get dead on my watch. But you're not going to do any rescuing until two things happen, one, we come up with a plan that actually stands a chance of working, and two, you get some serious training."

"Training?" she asked. "I know how to fire a weapon Mister Wolfwood. I know I may not exactly be in your or Mr V-" She smiled briefly and then said "Spikey's league, but I'm not defenseless."

"We're not going on a picnic Miss Stryfe," he replied coolly. "What you're talking about doing probably couldn't be done with all of us _plus _Spikey. Don't forget who we're up against. This guy routinely out-thinks and outmanuvers Spikey on a regular basis. We're talking about storming his stronghold and snatching one of the vital peices to his little endgame. There's no way I'm going in there with just me, a pacifist, an angel who doesn't seem to be living in the same reality as the rest of us most of the time, and you only half-trained at best. You don't even have any of your derringers on you. Not that it would make a difference if you did."

Meryl was about to protest hotly when Wolfwood cut in

"Think about it. Think about the kinds of fighters that Spikey had to face the _last _time around."

That at least, seemed to give her pause to consider. She hadn't actively been there through many of the battles but he knew she'd had to investigate and report damages after some of them, she was a smart woman, she was more than capable of following a trail of destruction and deconstructing the events that would have had to have taken place in order for them to happen. She knew the mechanics of the fights Vash had been in.

"Can you honestly say you're ready to take on people with that kind of skill at their call?" Wolfwood pressed, trying not to sound like he was desperately trying to talk her out of her fools quest.

"I don't know," she said after a moment.

"C'mon insurance girl," he prodded. "You work in insurance, you're not trained to handle this kind of situation."

She paused, seeming to mull over what he had just said and a glimmer of something appeared in her eyes. Wolfwood got the sinking feeling that his momentary victory had led to his oncoming defeat.

"What if my work is _exactly _what we need to win?" Meryl questioned aloud. "I minimize risks and prevent disasters by any means at my disposal for a living. "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" is my departments motto; if this guy is planning a disaster on such a massive scale then it's more than just _personal_..."

:_Oh, god_...: Wolfwood hung his head as he saw her getting fired up. :_Please deliver me from crazed career women and thier insane work ethics_!:

"It's a matter of _professional integrity_. How could I call myself Class A-1 if I didn't do everything in my power to prevent the biggest global disaster to strike since the Great Fall?"

"You can't collect your pay if you're pushin' up daisies Short Girl," he pointed out. "If you go at him as you are, we'll all meeting our maker a lot sooner than any of us had planned."

He hated to do it but someone had to before she got herself in so deep she wouldn't be able to see the surface. If she wouldn't listen to reason then he was just going to have to scare her off with the truth. Some days, he hated having to play the bad guy.

"Except maybe you," he added deliberately with thought. "He'll probably keep you around as a spare in case things don't pan out with your brother."

She blanched at that, as well she should. The kinds of things he might do to her to cow her into submission didn't even bear thinking about. If Legato was one twisted bastard, Knives had to be ten times worse.

"And Miss Remembrance would definitely be killed. Angelina he might let live simply because she's what she is. I'm out, naturally."

"Mister Wolfwood," she said severely, looking him directly in the eye. "I know exactly what you're trying to do. I know also the concern that's motivating it. I assure you I have no intention of sticking us all in an untenable situation unless there is absolutely no other way to go about it. The first thing you learn in insurance work is that often the most straightforward approach is not the best one. I was thinking more along the lines of an indirect approach before we go in there guns blazing and getting killed."

She paused and allowed a smile to appear.

"Attacking your enemies plans is always preferable to attacking your enemy. If I can get a bargaining chip on Knives, I can get my brother away from him. Now, is there any other target that Knives values? Preferably one that will be left with a minimal guard now that the cat is away."

Wolfwood found himself with a matching pleased smile stretching across his face.

"Short Girl, I know just the place..."

* * *

**Writing Meryl and Wolfwood is surprisingly fun. As a bit of trivia, did you all know what the D. in Wolfwoods name stands for? If you don't you should look it up... it's surprising and it made me laugh ( I had always assumed that it was short for something normal, like Daniel or David)**.** I hope you all enjoyed, please read and reveiw**.


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